According to Carlos Baker's biography of Hemingway, the title of this short story comes from a situation in Cuba; the heat was intense, and Hemingway remarked that it reminded him of the way it was on the lower Piave in the summer of 1918, while he was watching "a hell of a nice girl going crazy from day to day." Hemingway borrowed pieces of this girl's madness for Nick's confused behavior; for example, as Nick is leaving the captain, he feels another attack of confusion coming on: "He felt it coming on again. . . . He was trying to hold it in. . . . He knew he could not stop it now."
Many of Hemingway's novels and writings would focus on physical wounds and on the death and blood in this story. However, Hemingway also focuses on wounds unseen — the psychological results of war and the effect of a head wound on Nick Adams, a subject that he would return to in "Big Two-Hearted River."
