Nick Adams: Why Hemingway's Ordinary Actions Stay With Us
This essay discusses several Nick Adams stories, including their endings.
Leonard Cohen begins “Story of Isaac” with a door opening, a father coming into a room, and the information that his son is nine years old. Before the mountain or the sacrifice, we are made to occupy the child's position: someone much taller has entered with a purpose the child cannot know. The song will eventually turn outward, addressing those who demand sacrifices of others. Those first relations—father, son, age, movement—already establish the imbalance.
That beginning came to mind while reading Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. Some of them reach beyond their immediate circumstances with a force harder to name than technical excellence. The Sun Also Rises can hold our attention through its wit, dialogue, and carefully managed social world without necessarily producing that particular feeling. The Old Man and the Sea can produce it, despite the length of its central ordeal. Neither brevity nor affection for the subject matter explains the difference. One need not enjoy fishing to feel something when Nick goes fishing.
Hemingway's celebrated restraint explains little on its own: omissions can leave a scene inert as readily as they can make it resonate. For that, we have to watch what the sentences allow Nick to notice, what they make him do, and what they prevent him from settling.
The sounds a doctor chooses not to hear
In “Indian Camp,” Nick's father is called to help a woman whose labor has become dangerous. He brings Nick into the cabin and begins explaining childbirth as a medical process. When the woman cries out, Nick asks whether his father can stop her screaming. The doctor says he has no anesthetic, then supplies a principle for continuing his work: “I don't hear them because they are not important.”
The sentence is extraordinary for the authority it claims over perception. The doctor has not become deaf, but decided which sounds deserve his attention, and he presents that decision as a fact about the sounds themselves. Hemingway has previously made the woman's cries audible to us; immediately after the doctor's dismissal, her injured husband turns toward the wall on the upper bunk. Neither the husband's thoughts nor the woman's interior voice is available to us. We receive two responses to the same suffering: a professional who excludes the sound in order to act, and a man whose movement registers it without explanation. Nick is present for both.
The doctor's lessons fail to govern what Nick actually perceives. Nick answers “I see” to an explanation of labor, but during the operation he looks away. His father invites him to watch the stitching; Nick declines. Then, when the husband is discovered with his throat cut, the doctor orders Nick taken outside too late: the boy has already seen. Nick looks away from the event his father considers instructive and sees the event his father wants to spare him. What enters his experience is not determined by the doctor's expertise, and not event by the doctor's intentions.
A bass jumps; Nick trails his hand in the water, which feels warm against the morning chill. The boat carries him away from a death he has witnessed and toward a confidence the reader cannot share: he feels sure he will never die. Hemingway does not correct the child. The water's temperature and the fish's brief movement remain ordinary sensations, while the last sentence lets Nick inhabit a certainty made painfully fragile by everything we have just read. Hemingway gives us evidence Nick cannot yet arrange, and no narrator corrects him.
The woman's suffering remains central while her understanding is withheld. That unequal distribution of voice complicates any claim that the story simply gives us a universal human experience.
The time a fishing line can hold
“Big Two-Hearted River” takes the opposite risk. It describes, at extraordinary length, the weight of a pack, the fastening of a tent, the way grasshoppers behave in the dew, the knots and currents that govern a day of fishing. After the burned town of Seney, the narrative states, “The river was there.” The short clause restores a place; the prose then slows as Nick watches trout hold their positions against the current and follows the shadow of one large fish as it rises and returns to the bottom. Only after that extended movement does Nick feel “all the old feeling.” The word “old” opens a history we have not been told; the long passage of watching has supplied the physical occasion for its return.
Nick's camp is constructed with comparable patience. He cuts projecting roots from the ground, pulls up sweet fern, makes tent pegs, tightens the canvas, and closes the entrance against mosquitoes. A peg must hold before the tent can stand; the bed must be level before he can sleep. Hemingway gives the reader the small satisfactions of work that can be checked and completed. Yet the day is not sealed against memory. A pot of coffee brings back Hopkins, a companion from an earlier fishing trip who went away after striking oil and whom Nick never saw again. Even here, among manageable tasks, a loss enters through an object Nick knows how to use.
In the second part, a large trout breaks Nick's leader. Hemingway follows the rush, the failed hold, the broken line, and then the bodily aftermath: Nick is shaky and vaguely sick. He sits on a log and lets the disappointment subside before returning to the water. After pages spent learning the river's pace, we are made to wait for Nick to regain his own. An unsuccessful catch has become an experience we must recover from with him, rather than an event summarized as disappointment.
The swamp at the end resists becoming a blank onto which we project an unspecified injury. In a retrospective account, Hemingway described the story as omitting the war; a manuscript-based challenge questions the certainty with which the finished fishing trip is reduced to a war symptom. The published scene supplies something firmer than either exclusive explanation. Nick sees low branches, deep water, bad footing, and trout difficult to land. He anticipates a kind of fishing that would be “tragic,” and declines it for today. His refusal is an exact judgment about what he wants to undertake now. The closing prospect of future days leaves the swamp where it is. He has not conquered it, and he has not promised never to return.
The practical knowledge has given Nick's decisions their weight, and therefore, to translate every action instantly into a symptom would erase the time Hemingway made us spend coming to learn how the activity works.
The breakup that changes after it is over
Hemingway still demands our attention in “The End of Something”, but in a different way. Nick and Marjorie go fishing near the remains of a lumber mill. Hemingway first describes the dismantling of the mill, down to the machinery carried away by schooner; years later the couple pass its foundations. Marjorie sees a castle in the ruin; Nick offers almost nothing in reply. The town's former purpose is gone, but the place still exists for two people who do not see it alike.
Marjorie loves fishing with Nick. Hemingway lets her handle the rods, lines, bait, and boat competently. Nick, meanwhile, is increasingly irritable. When he tells her, “I’ve taught you everything,” the complaint exposes more than boredom: her knowledge, which should allow them to share the activity, has become something he resents. Their shared competence, once a form of intimacy, has become unbearable to one of them while remaining desirable to the other.
When Nick admits that the relationship is no longer enjoyable, Marjorie leaves in the boat. He offers to push it off; she answers, “You don’t need to.” Her competence, established through the fishing, gives that small refusal its authority. Hemingway doesn't need to announce that she can leave without him. We have already watched her work beside him. Bill then arrives, asks whether she went without a scene, takes a sandwich, and inspects the fishing rods. Nick is lying face down by the fire. The apparatus of the evening remains ready for use after the relation it was supposed to serve has broken.
The next Nick story, “The Three Day Blow,” unsettles even that ending. Talking with Bill over whisky, Nick first experiences the separation as irreparable; later, the thought that he might see Marjorie again makes him feel light. “Nothing was ever lost,” the narration declares from inside that sudden optimism. The same event changes its apparent finality as the conversation changes. Bill is eager to keep it finished. Nick's feeling will not stay within Bill's account of what was best for him. Hemingway lets the relationship end in one story and lets Nick revise its finality in the next.
The stream Nick can fish without water
“Now I Lay Me” gives us the most revealing variation. Here Nick speaks in the first person, lying awake near the front after being wounded. He fears that if he sleeps in darkness his soul may leave his body. To occupy the hours, he mentally fishes streams from his childhood, working along each bank, under logs, through pools and shallows, stopping to eat, running short of bait, finding more. The practical inventory of Big Two-Hearted River has become an operation of memory. There is no river, but the repeated “I would” and “sometimes” keep offering actions with which to fill the night.
Sometimes Nick invents streams, then remembers them so vividly that he confuses them with places he has actually fished. When an orderly urges him to think about marriage, he tries remembering women he has known, but their images blur with repetition. The streams do the opposite: there is “always something new about them.” His remembered rivers retain their differences even as the women he is urged to imagine marrying lose theirs.
Among the bait he recalls is a small salamander he once put on a hook. He remembers its color and agility, then its “tiny feet that tried to hold on to the hook.” After that one time, he never used another. A reader may know nothing about fishing; the movement of those feet makes the change in Nick’s behavior intelligible.
In “Indian Camp,” Nick’s father has decided that a woman’s cries are unimportant to the work he must do. Here Nick remembers a creature’s attempt to hold on to the hook and changes the way he fishes. We don't need to turn either action into a universal moral law to notice something important. The doctor excludes a sound; Nick preserves a movement. The small physical detail determines what each of them will do next.
“Now I Lay Me” does not finish with the salamander. John, the orderly who has been urging Nick to marry, falls asleep, and Nick returns to the sounds of silkworms eating.
The women he tries to remember have become indistinct, while the streams remain available to him, pool by pool. His final admission that he has never married leaves John’s confident prescription unanswered.
Hemingway has kept these experiences within the same night: a man unable to sleep, an animal that once tried to cling to a hook, a set of streams he can still travel in memory, and advice about his future that will not settle into a plan.
Sources
Ernest Hemingway, “Indian Camp”, “The End of Something”, “The Three Day Blow”, and “Big Two-Hearted River,” Parts I and II, in In Our Time (Boni & Liveright, 1925).
Ernest Hemingway, “Now I Lay Me”, in Men Without Women (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927).
Leonard Cohen, “Story of Isaac”, on Songs from a Room (1969); official audio.
Hemingway's retrospective account of the war omitted from “Big Two-Hearted River” appears in “The Art of the Short Story”. For a manuscript-based challenge to treating that account as the story's only explanation, see Allen Josephs, “The War in ‘Big Two-Hearted River’” (2018).
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