Haircut by Ring Lardner
Quick answer: Haircut by Ring Lardner: summary with the ending, the barber's account of Jim Kendall's death, Doc Stair, Julie Gregg and Paul Dickson, and the unreliable narrator.
A small-town Michigan barber chats to a stranger in the chair about the local character, a practical joker named Jim Kendall, recently shot dead in what the coroner called a hunting accident. Haircut appeared in Liberty magazine in March 1925 and in Lardner's collection The Love Nest the next year.
It is taught beside The Tell-Tale Heart as unreliable narration: a speaker telling a fond anecdote while the reader watches a murder assemble itself.
The story in brief, ending included
Whitey the barber remembers Jim Kendall as a card. Jim lost his job as a canned-goods salesman; his wife and two children went without because he drank the money. Once he told his family to meet him at the circus with the tickets and never came. Doc Ralph Stair, the young doctor newly made coroner, paid their way in. Jim also tormented Paul Dickson, a young man left simple by a fall from a tree, who worshipped Doc Stair for his kindness.
Jim made a pass at Julie Gregg, who loved Doc Stair; when she threw him out, he imitated Doc's voice on the telephone, lured her to Doc's dark office at night, and jeered at her with his friends. Paul told Doc, and Doc said a man like that ought not to be allowed to live. Paul heard. Soon after, Jim took Paul duck hunting and let him hold the gun; the gun went off and killed Jim. Doc Stair, as coroner, ruled it accidental. Whitey concludes that Jim probably deserved it, that the town misses him anyway, and asks whether the customer wants it combed wet or dry.
The characters
A barber, a joker, three victims.
Themes: small-town cruelty and the comedy of not noticing
The exam readings are the cruelty tolerated in a community that mistakes bullying for humour, the failure of a town's moral sense, and justice arriving by means the law would not recognise. Paul's shooting is an accident, a childlike execution of Doc's remark, or both; Doc's ruling is honest error or quiet complicity.
The sharper observation is that Lardner makes the reader the only moral agent in the story. Whitey does not judge, Doc does not investigate, the town laughs, and the reader alone puts the pieces in order.
The craft: an anecdote that indicts its teller
The opening promises gossip and light comedy and keeps that tone to the last line while the content darkens beneath it. The turn is Doc Stair's remark that Jim ought not to be allowed to live, delivered as an aside and heard by the one person who would take it literally. The ending pays off by refusing to acknowledge what it has revealed.
The technique to steal is voice at odds with matter: give a narrator affection for a subject the reader comes to loathe, and never let him catch up.
For class and essays
Model answers, vocabulary, one misreading.
What writers can take from this
- For exams, pair Haircut with The Tell-Tale Heart as opposite kinds of unreliable narrator: one mad, one merely dim.
- Cite the circus episode as the story's first proof that Jim's jokes had victims.
- Track Doc Stair's one sentence and who overhears it.
- Writers: let your narrator's tone stay fixed while the facts he reports get darker.
- End on a trivial question to show how the world absorbs a crime.
Try it yourself
Write a monologue in which a garrulous local tells a newcomer about a beloved character who recently died. Keep the speaker's affection constant, let every anecdote reveal cruelty the speaker does not see, and plant one overheard remark that explains the death. Close on a piece of small talk.
Questions
What is the theme of Haircut by Ring Lardner?
A community's moral blindness: a town that laughs at a bully's cruelty until someone too simple to laugh takes a doctor's remark literally. Unreliable narration turns the reader into the only judge.
Who killed Jim Kendall in Haircut?
Paul Dickson shot him with Jim's own gun on a duck hunt after overhearing Doc Stair say Jim ought not to be allowed to live. Doc, as coroner, ruled it an accident, and the barber believes him.
Why is Haircut an example of unreliable narration?
Whitey reports the facts accurately but admires Jim and accepts the accident verdict, so the reader assembles a murder the narrator never recognises.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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