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The door of Henry’s lunchroom opened and two men came in. They sat down at the counter.

“What’s yours?” George asked them. 

“I don’t know,” one of the men said. “What do you want to eat, Al?” 

“I don’t know,” said Al. “I don’t know what I want to eat.”

Hemingway’s opening line of “The Killers” sets the pace for the rest of the story. Without any kind of set-up, it begins as the two killers enter the lunch counter and the conflict begins. This moment could be considered the inciting incident of the story, although the threat of death is unknown to George, Nick, and Sam. The killers’ job has begun as they take in the lay of the land and begin to set the trap for Ole. 

The men immediately fall into an exchange of dialogue with George, which seems like an everyday conversation but carries a hint that the two didn’t enter the restaurant knowing what they wanted to eat. To the reader, this can be a signal that these two suspicious men might be the “killers” of the title, despite the lack of details actually given in this seemingly ordinary exchange. From this point onward, the conflict will build until the killers reveal themselves to the other characters and set their plan into motion.

“I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it. It’s too damned awful.”

“Well,” said George, “you better not think about it.”

The story ends as abruptly as it begins, seemingly without a resolution as the reader is left to wonder about the fate of Ole Andreson. The man is still alive by the end of the story, albeit in a state of despair, and in the end, neither the reader nor the characters see the titular killers actually kill anyone. The ending also leaves Nick with a choice between wondering about Ole’s fate or forgetting it all. In some ways, Nick is a stand-in for the reader, who must put down the story and either continue to contemplate what’s going to happen to Ole or put it out of their mind entirely. This type of ending is typical of Hemingway, who often left uncertainty in his stories, leaving it up to the reader to fill in the blanks or decide the answers to the questions he sets up in the narrative.

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