Hemingway’s In Our Time has a theme throughout of a preference to male-male relationships rather than male to female relationships. The males want to be dominating, stereotypically masculine, and tough. Males seem to have a close bond that creates understanding between them, intuitively, because it seems almost to be forbidden for a male to have and inherently female traits.
To start, in the story “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” the Doctor is accused of stealing wood. It becomes a pride issue with the doctor when he is being questioned by someone like Dick, who is of lower class than himself. To respond the doctor tells Dick, “If you think the logs are stolen, leave them alone and take your tools back to the camp (27).” Then the situation turns into something that could be potentially violent when the doctor threatens Dick that he could “knock [his] eyeteeth down [his] throat (28).” To prove masculinity or dominance the males in In Our Time constantly give in to stereotypical behavior.
The way that the doctor deals with his wife when returning to the house is with lies and assumes that she won’t understand his reactions. She, being a Christian Scientist doesn’t respect his career choice and being a woman doesn’t understand why he would get angry and she “hopes that he didn’t lose [his] temper.” To counter this, he decides to “[wipe] his gun carefully with a rag (30)” to feel that he is doing something masculine. The doctor decides to go for a walk and if he sees his son, Nick, “that his mother wants to see him (30).” Nick, in choosing to go with his father instead of obeying his mother, he is not only choosing a male to male relationship over male to female and “again chooses the direction of and for the father, however overtly masturbatory, suicidal, and dangerous may be the gun he fondles…(Gajdusek 54)”.
Instead of a father influencing Nick against male to female relations, in “The End of Something” Nick’s friend Bill seems to have had influence on...