Benson notes that all the fiction Hemingway had produced was included in the collection, that the connection between stories and vignettes is tenuous at best, and that Pound had an influence in editing the final product. Benson calls the work a "prose poem of terror", where looking for connections is meaningless. Conversely, Linda Wagner-Martin suggests the unrelenting tone of horror and somber mood unify the separate pieces. One of its early reviewers, D. H. Lawrence, referred to it as a "fragmentary novel".