A Very Short Story by Ernest Heminway is just that, a short tale of a man and a woman (Luz) who are madly in love and consider themselves to be married, but whose relationship falls apart in the end after Luz finds another man when her lover is away in America.
The story is very deliberately short to show how even though while it was going on the two “felt as though they were married,” it ended up not turning into anything. Hemingway often wrote about the transiency of romantic relationships, and this is a good example of him reminding that even though they were so close, still within just a few months the romance was over.
He also does not even give us the name of the man, implying that he could be any man, that any man could lose a lover like that. A purely romantic relationship like this one can be tampered off easily, the story shows, and therefore it is presumably best to be aware that attraction to people is not so special as it may seem and can easily be changed and that lasting relationships can be a result of luck, as well as presumably not just a romantic attraction.
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