Ernest Hemingway’s fashioning of Nick Adams may seem to be a collection of isolated moments in his character’s development. What I have focused on in my analysis of the Nick Adams stories is his development, his metamorphosis—his growth from child-hood to adult maturity. What was clear to me in that analysis was the changes in Nick’s growth from story to story: I termed those changes characterological shifts as Hemingway portrayed Nick. Nick moves from being a feeling subject in the early stories to being a reactor to experiential moments in later stories, then becomes a perceiver to what is happening to and within him to a doer in the final stories. Early on Nick is presented as being a reader, later on as a writer, and then as an author of written works—which is precisely what happened to Hemingway himself. Many of the Nick Adams stories share parallels with moments in Hemingway’s life. Nick Adams’ adult maturity presents him as a man, husband, father and author of profound accomplishment: A human being who has gained control of his mental and emotional self, a man of love and reverence for family and country, a man who has mastered a dawning awareness of the power of nada in human reality and life who has overcome that historical realization and its power of negativity and enervation of individual and collective spirit. Nick Adams represents a type of human being who has faced the collapse of traditional support structures and has built within himself the stamina to live with and beyond that spiritually eviscerating confusion. He thus represents a model human being who has encountered the harsh and pleasurable in human experience, the dawning of a profound breakthrough in human understanding of spiritual being—and has not floundered in despair of its realization.
Chapter Outlines
Chapter I: Introduction
Hemingway’s background to his Nick Adams stories is taken up here. He once stated he had “gotten rid of many things by writing [about] them.” It would appear that his stories about Nick Adams gave him the means to externalize some prominent memories of his youth and to create a memorial to them. He further stated that “his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.” His creativity in writing about Nick Adams transcends any simple transcription of personal experiences and underscores the role of invention in his writing. What was most important to him was to produce something approximating an “absolute truth” that would surpass mere facticity of personal experience. As his brother Leicester said, “He hoped that when anyone read his work he would actually experience the thing” ... that this “could not be done unless he put in the bad and the ugly as well as the beautiful” and ...”Only by showing [all] sides—putting in three dimensions and, if possible four, could he achieve what he wanted.”
Chapter II: Groundwork of Initiation
Nick’s groundwork of initiation into human reality begins in “Indian Camp” where he witnesses, as a five year old ?, the realities of birth and death. An Indian woman is screaming in pain at a Caesarian operation that is conducted without an anesthetic— her screams inducing her husband to slash his throat. In the next story, “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” Nick is exposed to conflicts in human relationships. Dick Boulton, an Indian who has come to do work for Nick’s father, a doctor, subsequently refuses to perform the work and leaves the doctor’s residence. Then a conflict erupts between Nick’s parents. It is clear that Nick, now a few years older, has been witness to previous discords. But we do find him reading a book that establishes an ongoing motif in his development. “The End of Something” presents Nick as a teenager who is going through the challenge of breaking up with a girlfriend, and then comes to terms with that ordeal in a “Three Day Blow” with his male friend, Bill. Next, Nick is adventuring on his own with “The Battler” and discovers the seamy side of human reality. He is conned by a brakeman and knocked from a train, then enters the camp of the battler and his negro compatriot. There he experiences further ruffianism and a peculiar pairing of two outcasts from normal society. “Chapter VI” finds Nick wounded, now a soldier who has determined to disavow patriotism in the futility and anguish of war. Subsequently, Nick is enamored of a new love in “A Very Short Story” that soon degenerates into his being rejected by his lover, winds up back in the States, and contracts gonorrhea from a sales girl “while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park” in Chicago. These initiatory experiences of his childhood and young adulthood have brought him to his next stage of development. He moves from being a feeling subject to being a reactor to his experienced contradictory life episodes.
Chapter III: Death of the Spirit
A vignette, “Chapter VII,” presents Nick praying to Jesus to get him “out of here.” This is another wartime experience that has him scared and fearful of death. He says to Christ, “If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say.” His desperation passes; he goes back to the work of soldiering. “The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he was upstairs with at the Villa Rosa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.” Nick’s reaction to his painful moment is to take pleasure with a Mestre prostitute, and to keep silent about his prayer to Jesus. Robert Penn Warren has noted that “the typical Hemingway hero is the man aware, or in the process of becoming aware, of nada. Death is the great nada.” “Soldier’s Home” has a Nick Adams like character experiencing disillusionment at hometown realities including girls, soldiers, parents and community. Nothing seems congenial to him. His mother preaches to him; he answers that he is not in “His Kingdom,” a reference to the Christian God. He decides he must “go to Kansas City and get a job” in order to escape everything that besets him. The taste of nada, its extension in his environment, has become oppressive to him. We next find a similarly-like character and Nick Adams in Europe, now a married man. “Cat in the Rain” and “Out of Season” exemplify marital neuroses and immaturity in both partners. Both stories present a marital relationship that is moving toward dissolution—a downward spiral. “Cross-Country Snow” removes Nick from his wife but engages considerable discussion of her. Nick and his friend George probe Nick’s marriage situation and conclude that it is not “hell” but very close to that. “Big Two-Hearted River” follows and finds Nick back in the States on a fishing outing that underscores his mental-emotional fragility that brings him to a crisis in his death-of-spirit spiral. From that experiential moment on Nick will begin a renewal of his existential self.
Chapter IV: Wayside Ways to Renewal
The third stage of Nick Adams’ metamorphosis pictures him as a perceiver of his ongoing experiences. The stories considered here share in common Nick’s integration, or attempted integration, with his surroundings and the ritual task now confronting hi—overcoming nada within himself and without. Hemingway’s metaphysics is foretold in the titles of the works from which the next seven stories derive: Men Without Women and Winner Take Nothing. The words “without” and “nothing” signify the complex dimension in which Nick’s renewal will occur—the environment where loss and death are painful realities. “In Another Country” presents Nick as the narrator; he mentions that “this was a long time ago.” This fact ages him perceptively. Among several characters he interacts with is an Italian major who has lost to death his young wife. Nick is revealed to be profoundly empathetic to the major when he learns about that loss. Nick himself, the victim of a vast spiritual waning, now makes a considerable advance toward his own renewal through his sympathetic regard for the major. In “The Killers” Nick is confronted with death, with nada, as he attempts to help Ole Andreson, a retired prizefighter, from being killed by two assassins. Ole rebuffs Nick’s efforts six times and challenges Nick’s incredulous comprehension of such defeatism. Nick clears out of Summit in a signature definition of his own renewal. “Ten Indians” advances Nick’s characterological development to the crucial stage of rebirth. Here, the sense of “loss’ is overcome as Nick adjusts to feminine infidelity. He also witnesses a more wholesome marital accord in the Garner parents. The ten Indians of this story are drunk men found along the road Nick and the Garners are traveling after a Fourth of July celebration. Nick is chided about his Indian girl friend Prudence Mitchell; when he returns home his father tells him he saw Prudence with Frank Washburn “threshing around” in the woods. That leads Nick to think he has a broken heart, but by the next day he finds himself nicely recovered—more evidence of his renewal. The well-being of Nick Adams resounds in “An Alpine Idyll.” Nick is again the narrator of this tale. He has been skiing with his friend John in the Silvretta when they descend to the village of Galtur. They pass a priest on the road, and later reflect on that priest when gossip reaches their ears. A peasant has apparently abused his dead wife’s body, and the onus of how so many learned about the story leads back to the priest. Nick carefully rises above judgmentalism to reveal his metamorphosis to rational adulthood and a full maturity. “Now I Lay Me” has Nick as the first person narrator. His stream-of-consciousness reveals the continuing pattern of his development as perceiver and thinker. He is laying on a floor listening to silk-worm droppings. Nick is struggling against the omen of death, of nada. He engages in thinking about and praying for loved ones in his memory, and later discusses the subject of marriage with John, his military orderly. Nick’s skepticism that marriage will “fix up everything” and his dubious sense that “the Lord my soul to take” is an empty promise encourages him in buttressing his psychic defenses against the threat of nada. “The Light of the World” further cast a dubious light on Christ’s “I am the light of the world.” Hemingway places the “light of life” in another sector of human experience—sexuality. Nick is interacting with bawdy characters fighting over a professional boxer, Steve Ketchel. Alice strongly defends the boxer’s name as Steve, not Stanley. Nick is erotically attracted to Alice, suggesting his continued renewal to life. Overcoming the eviscerating force of nada seems to be the task Hemingway has given Nick. It is certainly his task in “A Way You’ll Never Be.” Here Nick is experiencing a full blown psychosis that culminates in the senses of renewal and acquisition of a complex consciousness. By facing and overcoming the threat of nada, Nick Adams becomes a portrait of man in the modern age. What remains to be seen are the consequences of Nick’s metamorphosis in his final phase as a mature adult.
Chapter V: The Mature Nick Adams
Now at age 38, Nick Adams is a mature man, husband, father and author. He has passed through the stages of being a feeler, reactor, perceiver and is now a doer of complex deeds. We meet him again in “A Day’s Wait” where he is concerned with his son, Schatz, who has contracted influenza. Schatz has been schooled in France and is confused about his temperature—thinking that a doctor’s Fahrenheit reading indicates he may not survive. He was thinking of the centigrade scale which has caused his concern. Nick, his father, soon realizes his son’s confusion and attends to him with care, respect, responsibility and knowledge—earmarks of a compassionate and loving father. In “Fathers and Sons” Nick and his son are driving through a beautiful country-side somewhere in the southeastern United States. With the boy asleep, Nick starts thinking about his father whose vision was keener than Nick’s in his youth. Episodes with his father are recalled by Nick that reveal his fondness for learning the hunting and fishing skills his father imparted to him. Another incident with his father recalls an Oedipal-like wish that quickly disappears when he comes to his better senses. His son awakens and discusses Nick’s own youth with his Indian friends. From that four generations are configured reverentially, and a decision is made that they will have to visit the cemetery of Nick’s father, his son’s grandfather. In these two stories we see Nick Adams as a mature man of remarkable sensitivity and deeds—a doer of ennobling acts.
Chapter VI: Conclusion
The experience of dying and rebirth that characterizes Nick Adams’ development would seem to be Hemingway’s answer to the question, “What is the truth about human experience?” Caught between the realities of harmonious accord and brutalizing aggressiveness, Nick, and every man, must find a way to come to terms with mankind’s creative-destructive impulses. “Every individual man, at any period in history, must develop his own mature ‘civilization’ out of his own childhood ‘culture.’” Such a task was Hemingway’s and, in turn, Nick Adams’. The end of the road Nick Adams was traveling led to another beginning, to another effort to heal the rifts in a childhood culture marked by pleasant and painful memories. His final drive was toward light, order, and union in the country of his mind and in the country of his birth. His ultimate destination was similar to the one T. S. Eliot aptly penned in his poem “Four Quartets”:
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
The religious meaning of such exploration need not depend upon traditional religious formulae. Life was the crucial coordinate in the young Hemingway’s world view. His realism incorporated a considerable awareness of man the psycho-biosocial being, a natural phenomenon. The wainscot of his creativity as an artist embraced this facticity of human existence. “The future is really disclosed by finding out what people can sing about.” The things that Hemingway sings about in his Nick Adams stories are the realities of dying and rebirth, and the possibilities of a full and authentic life. The characterological development—metamorphosis—of Nick Adams follows a downward, then upward, transformation toward maturity. He reaches this goal in the roles of man, husband, father and author. His spiritual chronology traverses a pattern of vast proportions, both in the experiential moment and in the overall sweep of his development. Somewhere in the synaptic conclaves of his inner spirit, he merges with some of the profounder aspects in every man’ spiritual autobiography.
