Can someone explain the message of this story?"The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" (What are the underlying messages about death,government, and...

Despite its title, the main character of Hemingway's "The
Gambler, the nun, and the Radio"--if there truly is a main character--is Mr. Frazier,
who acts as a recording consciousness of what one critic calls "the essential
disfranchisement" of the residents in the hospital, whom "They brought...in around
midnight."

Among the injured brought into the hospital,
there is a fatalistic resignation in the Cayetano, the gambler, shot in the stomach, who
decides that he simply has no luck and accepts his
injury,

"I am
a poor idealist.  I am the victim of illusions.....I am a cheap card play, only
that."

The first bullet
intended for him has been intercepted by the Russian.  So, it seems that he has no luck,
either. 

When the nun, who prays to be a saint and is
separated from the world in her spiritual alienation, invites Mexicans to visit Cayetano
at the hospital, they later come into Frazer's room.  He offers them drinks, but one
refuses saying that he would suffer a headache if he were to drink.  Then, he tells
Frazer that he does not trust those in the religious life such as the nun, saying that
he believes in nothing, and quoting Marx,"Religion is the opium of the people."  His
statement gives Frazer cause for thought after everyone leaves, even though he has the
radio on to keep from thinking.

Yes, Frazer decides, he
believes that

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religion is the opium of the people....and music
is the opium of the people....now economics is the opium of the people; along with
patriotism the opium of the people in Italy and Germany....But drink was a sovereign
opium of the people,...Althugh some prefer the radio, another opium of the
people...Along with these went gambling, and opium of the people if there ever was one,
one of the oldest....But was was the resl, the actual, opium of the people?...Of course;
bread was the opium of the
people....

Bread is symbolic
of life.  For Frazer, then, life itself is an illusion, an opium. Only death is real,
for it has no intermediaries to help with the futile operation of existence.  All are
but patients, who wait for the end with drink, and gambling, prayer, and music as opiums
to soothe their way to the final injury after life that is itself an
injury.