Three shots seems like a story where there’s a kid who has a huge fear while being outdoors late at night. I’ve concluded this because the author basically says it throughout the whole story. The author talks about how he has a fear of dying, sleeping in the woods and being alone in the woods. Hemingway generates the story through a lot of context clues that gives off obvious reason why Nick is terrified. The fear he faces is expressed from different angles.
In the third paragraph, Earnest talks about how he gets frightened when he lays down in the tent late at night while his father and uncle are out on the boat fishing. “Nick felt if he could only hear a fox bark or an owl or anything he would be all right. He was not afraid of anything definite as yet. But he was getting very afraid.” Here, Hemingway indicates how the sound of quietness scares him due to his expectations of something happening. He’s so startled that it almost seems as if he’s trying to anticipate when something tragic is about to happen. The fourth paragraph even shows how Earnest asserts Nick reading a book under the hall light until morning. Poor kid is so spooked, that he wasn’t even able to get any rest.
As mentioned earlier, Nick also is really worried about dying. “Some day the silver cord will break” kept
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Earnest talks about how he fires three shots from the rifle given to him by his uncle and dad. Before they would head out, they’d tell Nick to let off tree shots incase of any emergency. Unfortunately, he was just letting them off because he became very terrified at curtained moments when he was lonely inside the woods. The story seemed to indicate that nothing really ever happened to Nick, he was just really scared being of being by himself in the woods. Letting off the three shots just made him feel a little more comfortable knowing that his guardians were going to stop whatever they were doing to come and make sure he was