Big Two-Hearted River

Nick Adams is the sole character in “Big Two-Hearted River” (although one might argue that nature itself is a character in the narrative). Nick is portrayed as emotionally detached, a keen observer of nature, and comfortable alone in the woods.

Nick Adams is a recurring character in Hemingway’s short fiction, the protagonist in two dozen stories, and he has much in common with the author. Like Nick in “Big Two-Hearted River,” Hemingway was an outdoors person. Each summer his family traveled to northern Michigan, where his father took him hunting and fishing, and as a 20-year-old veteran of World War I, Hemingway went camping and fishing with high school friends in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

In keeping with Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” of narrative, little of Nick’s backstory is revealed in the text. He gets off the train expecting to find the town of Seney, which he remembers fondly, but instead finds the ruins of the town in a fire-ravaged landscape. It’s clear that he’s been away for some time, and that the destruction of the town weighs heavily on his emotions, but the connection between all this and the recently ended First World War is implied rather than stated.

Nick himself seems to be working hard to keep the submerged part of his personal iceberg from surfacing. He keeps his mind carefully on the task at hand: first hiking to find a campsite, then laboriously setting up camp, making coffee and food, and preparing his fishing gear. Near the end of Part 1, as he begins to reminisce about his friend Hopkins, he senses the danger of indulging in nostalgia: “His mind was starting to work. He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough” (Paragraph 37). This “choking” of the mind is, for most of the story, his primary goal. He does everything, from releasing a too-small trout to making onion sandwiches, with enormous care and attention. This exacting approach to life has two purposes: First, it restores a sense of order and safety to his world, which has lately been dominated by chaos and violence; second, it keeps his mind focused on concrete tasks, preventing abstract thought, which for him is dangerous.