Is it moral ambiguity or helplessness?

Hemingway takes a strictly fly-on-the-wall approach to telling this story, and I don't think this is for the sake of the narrative. One could easily imagine an exposition of this story with more engaging detail, character-developing inner monologue, and more active language to create dynamics. But Hemingway tells his story as blandly and as minimally as possible, and leaves us with not a world and group of characters to be engaged with, but a simple test-tube to be observed.

This nonchalantly told story about actionless characters acting nonchalantly to a horrible occurrence has, in my opinion, two possible underlying themes. The first is moral ambiguity. Not only does Hemingway promote this through his storytelling - handling all the characters exactly the same, whether good or bad, and giving us no moment of justice for the perpetrators of the story - but his characters seem to take no moral initiative at all. Surely someone could have easily and safely alerted the police; a more proactive character could have helped Ole escape. Most importantly, three men had a reasonable chance throughout the bulk of the story to overtake these two unremarkable hitmen. Perhaps most revealing is the defeatist language near the end: "I guess they will," "Well, you better not think about it." Passive language helps to facilitate this ambiguity, in much the way a callous filmmaker might pan over an injured, screaming women unsympathetically.

The other possibility is determinism. The story flows quickly without any accentuations or dramatic elaborations or pauses. It gives you exactly what you think will happen, as if it were happening in our nonfictional universe. There is also a sense of inevitability in their discussing Ole's fate. The story leaves you with every indication that he will be killed.

Either or both of these themes could be commentary on Hemingway's time and place, or America in general. Hemingway often described his generation as victims of post-war disillusionment, having a lack of direction and purpose, and borderline nihilistic. As Hemingway mechanically reels us through the story objectively, with indifference to every character, one senses his belief in a fatalism and purpose-robbing void every bit as ubiquitous as a booky you can't run away from.