At two o’clock in the morning

from “In Our Time” by Ernest Hemingway

At two o'clock in the morning two Hungarians got into a cigar store at Fifteenth Street and Grand Avenue. Drevitts and Boyle drove up from the Fifteenth Street police station in a Ford. The Hungarians were backing their wagon out of an alley. Boyle shot one off the seat of the wagon and one out of the wagon box. Drevitts got frightened when he found they were both dead. “Hell, Jimmy,” he said, “you oughtn't to have done it. There's liable to be a hell of a lot of trouble.”

“They're crooks, ain't they?” said Boyle. “They're wops, ain't they? Who the hell is going to make any trouble?”

“That's all right maybe this time,” said Drevitts, “but how did you know they were wops when you bumped them off?”

“Wops,” said Boyle, “I can tell wops a mile off.”

Annotations:

Fifteenth Street, Grand Avenue –streets in Manhattan; there’s liable to be – here: there’s going to be; crooks – slang: criminals; wops – slang: people from Italian origin; to bump off – here: to kill; tell – here: recognize.

Tasks:

Deal with the following tasks (with the possible exception of task 3b) in one coherent text, subdividing it by the appropriate task numbers. Find a convincing beginning and a good ending to your text.

1. Describe the events in more detail – what might have happened before, what does actually happen here, what consequences do the policemen expect or fear? (200 words)

2. What is the attitude of the two policemen towards “wops”, and how is this revealed in this short short story? – point of view, style, choice of words, sentence structure (e.g. parallelism), etc. (200 words)

3a. Considering the definition of the short story in your book “Previews”, does this text fit to this definition? Comment.
or (alternatively)

3b. Imagine there has been a witness to the event and the policeman is charged with manslaughter. How might the prosecutor and the defence lawyer argue the case in court? (remember the rules of a debate)
(300 words)