This dynamic of masculinity and women seems to be a recurring theme in Hemingway's writing. At the end of the story again, a second matador takes home a prostitute for whom the coward was buying drinks. She even resorts to calling him a coward to his face. The matador makes advances on Paco's sister, a chambermaid at the hotel, and is rejected by her. Hemingway brings the issue of cowardly men and their treatment by women into this story much as he did in the Francis Macomber tale. He was impaled by a bull's horn but survived and was since a less than impressive matador. One of them is specifically labeled a coward.
#The capital of the world hemingway characters full
Hemingway gives us this line in the final paragraph: "He died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions."Įqually interesting is a peripheral issue concerning the matadors. He never comes to age, but dies a romantic. He dies without ever experiences the decline and fall of a bullfighter, an experience that the three past-their-prime matadors staying at the hotel went through. Paco is unquestionably a romantic, and is contrasted by his cynical co-worker, Enrique, who had tried bullfighting himself, but run in fear from the bull's charge.Įnrique challenges Paco's claims to bravery in the face of an actual bull, and simulates a charge of the bull's horns with a chair which he has fastened kitchen knives to. A boy, Paco, works at the hotel and fantasizes about becoming a brave bullfighter himself. A hotel in Madrid is filled with various characters associated with bullfighting, the matadors themselves, picadors, and banderilleros. Here we have an exploration of the "coming of age" theme, but a case in which the protagonist never actually comes to age.
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