Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber Essay

Ernest Hemingway’s story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, is about a wealthy couple who travels to Africa on a Safari. On their journey, they are escorted by a hunter named Robert Wilson, who acts as a foil character to Macomber, highlighting how he is not a real man.. Macomber has the opportunity to kill a lion, but he runs away. This makes his character stray away from the story’s idea of what a real man is. A real man in this story is portrayed as courageous, prideful, and he must also have a beautiful woman at his side. In the end of the story, Macomber overcomes his fear, and shoots a buffalo, proving his manliness. However, when he’s at his happiest moment, his wife shoots him, leaving the reader to question whether or not it is an accident.

Courage is a very heavily focused topic in Hemingway’s story. Courage is to not show fear in the face of danger. Wilson is courageous because he faces these animals and kills them. Macomber lacks courage when he runs away from the lion. This makes him feel like less of a man, and makes his wife see him in the same light. She cheats on him with Wilson because he is way more manly in comparison to Macomber. This is the last straw for Macomber,

To have pride, one must have many achievements first, which can be assumed as a reason why Macomber wanted to go on the safari in the first place. Wilson has pride in himself because of his dangerous job, but also because he sleeps with a lot of women. An example of his pride is when he talks about his standards with women compared to his standards with hunting. He says “...and their standards were his standards as long as they were hiring him. They were his standards in all except the shooting. He had his own standards about the killing and they could live up to them or get someone else to hunt them.” (12). Wilson is shown to be prideful because he has his own set of morals when accomplishing his