With this sentence, Ernest Hemingway ends one of his briefest short stories, "I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something":
And it was sad to know that shooting did not mean a thing.
The sentence surprises because it follows a father's discovery, seven years after the fact, of his son's plagiarizing a published short story to win a fiction contest. Until this moment in the story, the son's writing seems secondary to his shooting skills, which his father had helped him to cultivate. It comes after a scene depicting the father's mentorship of his son on good sportsmanship, social etiquette, and the value of hard work. Immediately preceding that final sentence are two devastating ones describing the father's abhorrence of his son for his "vileness": "Now he knew that boy had never been any good. He had thought so often looking back on things."
With this final paragraph, Hemingway probes the complexity of father-son relationships, the remarkable burdens fathers place on their boys, the inevitable damage of estrangement, and the deceptive nature of memory.
