Coming of Age in a Lost Generation:
Nick Adams, Ernest Hemingway, and the American Bildungsroman Tradition
O Adam Cruz
“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” ~ J.D. Salinger
Regarding Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams’ short stories, author Phillip Young asserts Hemingway gives a “meaningful narrative…[where] a memorable character grows from child to adolescent to soldier, writer, and parent” (Preface 6). Assuming this interpretation, The Nick Adams Stories, the first published in the 1925 short story collection In Our Time, should fit into the “Coming of Age,” or Bildungsroman, a long-standing literary tradition. Originating in Germany as early as 1819, Bildung (or “transformational”) works paint a picture of initiation where children (called initiates) journey and “mature into what they are destined to become” (Kontje 2). Over decades and continents, the “Coming of Age” novel adhered to strict story arcs and norms, making works of Bildung easily recognizable. These guidelines became so characteristic, however, that Hemingway works--A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, and especially the short stories on Adams—are often left out of the genre. Critics like Debra Moddelmog argue that Nick’s story, in his journey from childhood to adulthood through travel, adventure, and war, “almost qualifies as a Bildungsroman…but not quite” (602).
What Moddelmog and similar Bildung critics neglect in their reading of Adams, however, is the importance that “time and place” has on Coming of Age works (Kontje 3). Because Bildungsroman traces the growth of a singular character within his environment, historical context is particularly important when studying Bildung. The primary goal of character maturation is to “create order out of chaos and to…develop an identity that meshes with society’s dominant ideologies” (Rishoi 2-3). Additionally, personal experiences hold a salient role. Bildung is described as “fact and fiction intermingled” (Buckley 24); imagination of stories rooted in “self and personal experience” (Tavernier-Courbin xi). Thus, when reading Hemingway it is particularly important to examine his context, his role, and his experiences in early 1900s America. Hemingway’s own coming of age story, the 1964 memoir A Moveable Feast, gives shape to his Bildung work. Hemingway rose to adulthood in “the Lost Generation,” a period of initiation both during and in the aftermath of World War I, and a term Hemingway himself popularized (Dolan 40). In his writing Hemingway became the “spokesmen of the Lost Generation…whose stories fixed the accent of two generations” (Rivot 18). Insistent on “presenting things truly” (Cowley 224), Hemingway’s fiction “embodied the complexity, individuality, situatedness, dignity, and valiant tragedy of human life” as he and some in his era saw it (Bennett 555). These tendencies stemmed directly from Hemingway’s own experiences, and greatly influenced his Bildungsroman.
In Hemingway’s social context, one in which his wounding and similar traumas he witnessed in World War I resonated, previous Bildung tradition did not produce stories the Lost Generation could relate to. Thus, I assert that Hemingway created his own school within Bildung tradition, a Bildungsroman of the Lost Generation—of his lost generation. This generation was not marked by education or adventure but instead trauma. True transformation occurred when one was able to learn to cope with trauma, reflected in the Bildung narrative position. For Hemingway, this trauma was being blown up at night (Cowley 230)—an experience that Young argues had “long-standing literary consequences” (A Reconsideration 168). Instead of reaching adulthood through adventure or marriage, Hemingway’s heroes, and the author himself, could only reach initiation into adulthood by moving past their trauma, through self-discovery and self-revelation, thus creating “an American version of Bildungsroman” (Rivot 79). In order to do this, Hemingway’s initiate turned to craft, perfected acts “universal and symbolic” (51) to embrace not only in order to cope but also to grow. Hemingway’s new approach is best codified in his earliest attempt in the Nick Adams’ stories, culminating in the short story “Big Two-Hearted River.” Through Nick, we see how trauma derailed the Coming of Age of the era’s adolescents, forcing the character to face a fearful adult world. The protagonist follows the advice of his Major; echoing the sentiments of the Lost Generation, the Major asserts “if a man were to lose everything…[to live] he must find things he cannot lose” (The Nick Adams Stories 173). And so the initiate adopts craft over marriage and adventure as a means to reach their greatest potential. For Nick, this craft is fishing in the charred remains of his childhood. For Hemingway himself, in his Coming of Age, his coping and initiation came through the craft of writing, detailed in A Moveable Feast and elsewhere. Making use of the therapeutic power of craft, Hemingway created his own Bildung tradition for an America forever changed by the Great War.
The Lost Generation and Hemingway’s Place
Before studying The Nick Adams Stories, and their effect on Bildung tradition, we first must look at the context in which Hemingway created his titular character. Hemingway’s own coming of age was greatly altered by virtue of reaching adulthood in the aftermath of World War I. Hemingway and his contemporaries who came of age in the era were known as the “Lost Generation.” The term, originally employed by a German Newspaper in 1912, was used exclusively in Britain and France the first years after World War I to describe the artistic cohort that had been reduced by the fighting (Dolan 41). It did not become popularized in America until 1926; it was Hemingway himself that made the phrase international with his paired epigraphs in The Sun Also Rises (41). As time passed, the phrase came to describe anyone who had come of age during the World War I.
What defined this Lost Generation? Central to the idea of the “Lost Generation” was World War I, commonly known as The Great War (1914-18). The people of the generation were young adults marked by “disillusionment,” a disillusionment that “had something to do with the war” (Dolan 42). These sentiments starkly contrasted with the feelings young soldiers had heading into combat. The war was extremely popular among the public at its outset (Watson 2); how people felt about the war during fighting contrasted with this jaded nature of postwar stigma. This disillusionment was most apparent in the returned foot soldiers of World War I—a fraternity to which Hemingway himself belonged. According to war critic Janet Watson, “distance in time and space” from the war, after the soldiers returned from fighting and months passed, made “disillusionment a dominant post-war phenomenon” for young war veterans as well as their non-fighting peers (2). In America, Great Britain, and Germany, the young generation had marched off with images of grandeur and invincibility (20). They returned with their pre-war feelings of immortality lost, a gut-wrenching experience for adolescents and “quite a lot of lose” for those so young (Adair 300).
One large reason for the post-war disillusionment of the Lost Generation was the psychological damage the soldiers had endured in the bloody conflict. With new technology and an emphasis on deadly trench warfare, combatants in World War I saw fighting that claimed more than 37 million causalities (Watson 4). Aside from their physical injuries, soldiers returned home psychologically rocked worse than any previous generation of veterans. Before the diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was prevalent (the term was first coined in 1975 while dealing with Vietnam veterans), the effected were described as having “shell shock” and suffering from what Sigmund Freud termed “war neurosis” (Scott 296). As symptoms of shell shock—fatigue, insomnia, and depression—were mostly seen in the younger soldiers, however, military personnel and governments alike doubted the legitimacy of their suffering. The disillusioned soldier was akin to the weak, furthering the sense of isolation amongst the young combatants (Scott 297). Even worse, many of the traumatized soldiers were returned to war—65% of shell-shocked soldiers resumed front-line fighting after their hospital visit (296).
Therefore, with no help available, many young veterans sought isolation and were “nearly absent of optimism” (Dolan 43) upon their return home. They suffered a “disjunctive return to the civilian world,” isolating themselves and others who came of age during the War (Wesley 2). Post-war poets such as Issac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke, and Wilfred Owen wrote prose of young men whose “flower of youth was destroyed” and of those left at home “[losing] the best of their generation” to death and depression (Roberts 12). Soldiers looked to heal themselves, often engaging in unproductive behaviors like drinking and gambling. Writer Gertrude Stein, a contemporary and friend of Hemingway’s in his post-war Parisian years, described “the young people who served in the war” as having “no respect for anything” and “[drinking themselves] to death” (Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 29) upon their return, a sentiment echoed by many adults who came of age long before the war. Jaded youth traveled and attempted to escape anything that reminded them of the war, drifting with no clear path and avoiding a humanity they regarded as stained. Men returned from fighting to find they no longer had a home (Adair 295). They were not understood by their families and friends, or by the doctors, or even their fellow soldiers. The horrors and trauma of World War I signified “the end of [their] youth, the end of an entire worldview and of feelings that life is rational and controllable” (300). With this innocence lost, war veterans especially buried themselves into a Lost Generation of disillusionment.
Hemingway’s life, since his coming of age coincided with the war, was inextricably intermingled with the Lost Generation. His own life events, both in the war and in its aftermath, fit Watson’s “[dominant] experience of the Great War” (13). In the postwar memoir A Moveable Feast, Stein identifies the author as such in 1922 Paris, saying “[he and] all the young people who served in the war…are [the] lost generation” (Hemingway 29). Even before the war, though, Hemingway acquired some of the Lost Generation disillusionment. As a newspapermen, the author found himself confronted each day with “100 items of petty human behavior, violence, and corruption” (Rivot 42), creating a strong corroboration with the alienation of the era. In 1918 Hemingway volunteered as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross on the Italian Front of World War I—“eagerly, [and] always wanting to be where the action was” (Cowley 232), much like Watson’s excited and honored pre-war soldiers (2). He was wounded by mortar fire in a trench at Fostalla di Paive. The explosion killed three soldiers, one of whom died on Hemingway’s shoulders en route to the command post (Cowley 232). Hemingway’s own wound consisted of 237 steel fragments in his leg, a reminder of an experience that would traumatize him for much of his life and “spooked him until the end” (239).
The Ernest Hemingway we see in his A Moveable Feast, along with the author’s letters to friends concerning the war, gives a concrete example of the postwar, Lost Generation artist. A Moveable Feast presents “a remarkably coherent [representation]…of ‘The Lost Generation’” and gives readers “an indication of projection and mood…[of how Hemingway and others] might remember feeling” (Dolan 39-40). The posthumous story gives us a young Hemingway, married and recently returning from war, conducting his own “escape” by relocating to Paris. The novel never directly gives the young author’s thoughts on the war, suggesting a fear to even consciously remember anything about Italy (Crowley 32). But upon further study we get a real young adult in the author who, as Stein says, embodies “a génération perdue” (A Moveable Feast 29). Mulling over this designation, Hemingway feels a common bond with all of those his age. He wonders if a boy in who Stein grouped him with in the Lost Generation had been “hauled [away]…in a converted ambulance” (AMF 30) like he was. Hemingway feels isolated from others around him, even artists, as he “did not trust anyone who had not been in the war” (82). It is in his 1948 letter to Cowley, though, where Hemingway’s mental instability is most apparent, and shell shock most evident. He writes that “in the First World War I [he] was hurt very badly; in the body, mind and spirit and also morally…hurt all the way through” (Cowley 229-30). Hemingway’s own words illuminate the unspoken trauma in the pages of A Moveable Feast and illuminate an author who truly identified with his readers.
Thus the timing of Hemingway’s 1899 birth, his traumatic experience, and his shell-shocked after-effects gave him a shared history with the Lost Generation. He accepted his place in the context given to him without argument. However, unlike Stein he refused to make his generation unique, claiming that “all generations [are] lost by something” (30). For Hemingway the others who grew up in his era, their “lostness” was due to the trauma of war. Unique or not though, literature changed for good in the Lost Generation. American men became “deeply alienated and disillusioned” because they were unable to live the “myth” handed down to them by men of previous generations (Rishoi 16). The ideals no longer fit them; older generations did not understand their plight. How writing in particular changed was apparent in war rhetoric in comparison to postwar works. The literary postwar experience resembled but little of the poetry, fiction, and non-fiction news written during war years—a notable schism between popular war sentiment and later, embittered reflection on war experiences (Watson 2). Young adults rejected all modes of war writing—literature in particular—because it did not yet classify them as victims of history (Dolan 44). Amongst this artistic uncertainty, Hemingway began his career. He grew up “with no basic relation to any prewar culture, [and] learned to write in a literary environment that could not remember 1913” (Bennett 556). Instead of running from this responsibility, Hemingway met the cries of his generation with open arms. He used his work to become “the spokesman of the Lost Generation” (Rivot 18). Hemingway’s 1926 The Sun Also Rises explicitly uses the signifier of “Lost Generation”; Marc Dolan claims that A Farewell to Arms is as responsible as any historical work for “the myth of Lost Generation” (40). In line with sentiments of his era, Hemingway’s work was “haunted” (Cowley 224) and filled with an overwhelming sense of hostile isolation (Rivot 21). By embracing both his own experiences and the popular feelings of the day, he was able to create a “protomyth” in his stories, where he blended truth to create stories “representative of the Lost Generation” (Dolan 47). Though he refused, in most cases, to mention the war itself (AMF 76), Hemingway’s work evoked how veteran experience felt. The result was literature that not only gave the Lost Generation a voice but also demonstrated an understanding of their post-war sentiments. What distinguished postwar writing was the sense that the youth of the lost generation was now “speaking for itself” (Dolan 43) instead of letting those like Stein speak for them. By bravely writing about the after-effects of the war, Hemingway’s work “provided…an answer to the question of what literature is, a question that concerned many critics after the war” (Bennett 552). He most effectively accomplished this task in his variation of the Bildungsroman tradition.
Bildungsroman literary tradition: From Germany to America to Hemingway
Equally important to Hemingway’s historical context is the previous tradition of Bildungsroman, and the characteristics of the genre Hemingway attempted to work within. Bildung, originally a religious term referring to the active transformation of a man through divine work, became a secular and literary concept in late eighteenth century Germany, coinciding with the increase in production of the novel (Kontje 1). Now secularized, individual development was instead seen as a development from innate potential within persons and through interaction with one’s environment (2), and not through God, shifting the focus from nature to society. The Bildung works began to tackle issues such as cultural norms within the transformation and to explore how these ideologies effected development. Coming of Age novels became a “site of identity production…that both resist and produce cultural identities” (Rishoi 9). The core of the work was still about transformation; however, its purpose became to create a universal experience to which all men could connect (18). Rather than focus on the perfection of a religious coming of age, the novelic Bildung made less certain, but more relatable, claims on the messy transition from boyhood into manhood.
Though Coming of Age tales have different specific storylines, over time Bildung tradition created a series of “norms” in the development of its male protagonists. Works classified as Bildungsroman give a broad outline of a typical plot, and the principal characteristics within the genre (Buckley 17)—including the presence of a mentor figure and the autobiographical elements at work within the writing. The story, usually linear in design, begins in childhood and progresses steadily towards a mature adult (Goodman 30). In this singular journey, most Bildungsroman follow the same general pattern outlined by critic Jerome Buckley. A child grows up in a country or town that constrains him both socially and intellectually. His family, primarily the father figure, is antagonistic to his ambition and forces the child-hero to leave and independently make his way into a new community (Buckley 17). From there, his “real” education begins—he has multiple first encounters (some sexual, some not) that force him to reappraise his values. Once this “painful soul-searching” occurs, the Bildung hero makes accommodations to fit into the modern world and leaves his adolescence behind for maturity, sometimes visiting his old home to demonstrate the wisdom of his choices or the changes he has made (18). However, even at the end of his journey, the hero is “by no means guaranteed a resolution to his problems”—often, the end is found as the “least satisfactory” part of a Bildungsroman (23). The hero may find himself ultimately defeated by larger society or disenchanted with the real world, and the narrative may conclude with an open question of the hero’s final choices. Regardless, his experiences create a moment of initiation. Whether through a sexual act, a heroic journey, or a mentor’s example, the initiate arrives into the adult world. Though Buckley notes that no single novel fits precisely the same pattern, he argues no work within the genre ignores two or three of its principal elements: childhood, conflict between generations, provinciality and larger society, self-education, alienation, and vocation search (18).
Outside the central protagonist in Coming of Age works is the presence of a mentor-figure. As Buckley notes, often the growing child is orphaned or childless (ex: David Copperfield), and if the father is present, he tends to be a villainous character who thwarts the drives and desires of the hero (19). Sometimes the father is the chief reason the boy leaves his home. Thus, once away from his homeland, the protagonist seeks out a substitute parent and a mentor to guide his journey. According to critic Earl Rivot” the Bildung initiate “is placed in a learning relationship with one or more characters…which will teach him about the nature of life, how best to live it, and also most importantly something about himself” (95). An absence of a viable mentor for Nick in Hemingway’s collection creates a large gap (Rivot 49); in traditional Bildung the absence of a mentor would prevent the child from making a successful push (Gottfried-Miles 122). The typical Hemingway hero then, often isolated both by his own choice and because there is no feasible option, would have his journey ultimately prove fruitless.
Finally, Buckley points out the characteristic autobiographical element to the genre of Coming of Age. Though all writing is autobiographical in some sense (Rishoi 2), there are “many degrees of identification between author and hero” in works of Bildung, near autobiographical novels with “fact and fiction inextricably mingled” (Buckley 24). If properly controlled, these autobiographical elements lend a “peculiar vibrancy to character, setting, and incident” (24), strengthening the Coming of Age novel. By using his own experiences as groundwork for character creation, unlike in non-fiction, the author has the freedom to omit and add as he sees fit during “his” own move from boyhood to manhood. The author can assign his hero some of his own acts or feelings, and invent many others to complete his dramatic characterization (26). At first glance, this element would aid any Hemingway-Bildung argument pertaining to Nick—Howard Hannum claims “autobiographical assumption is virtually automatic among those who [study] Nick” (92), and Nick shares both Hemingway’s attitudes and experiences (Flora 69). However, Hemingway’s projection may go too far, even for Bildung. At times, Hemingway loses control over Nick, “identifying too closely…[writing] autobiography instead of fiction” (Moddelmog 591). By identifying with Nick so entirely, Hemingway’s work can be interpreted as too specific to his own life to capture the universality of Bildungsroman.
Despite similarities across Bildung works, contextual differences—time, place, historical events—alter the story arc. In other words, because the Bildungsroman draws upon this autobiographical material (Goodman 29), the author’s context and culture greatly shapes the hero’s journey. Different climates produce different cultures, which create different ideals of initiation into adulthood (Kontje 2). Often those who transgress cultural norms are ostracized and find no place in Bildungsroman works (Rishoi 3). Because across time and space the education of youth is so vastly different, the novel’s structure and the hero’s journey would logically differ (Goodman 29). For example, in novels set in the American West, to be initiated into manhood a boy must “learn to ride a horse, shoot a gun, butcher a steer, and drink whiskey with ranch hands” (38). The social, political, and cultural difference between eras can be seen in the lives of the characters as they try to grow into and “fit” the mold and strict arc. Because of this, Bildung works can both champion and exemplify their society, like many of the European models did, or critique the pitfalls of their world.
Before Hemingway even began writing, America gave twists of its own to Bildung tradition. A catalyst in this molding was Mark Twain. Hemingway himself wrote that “all modern American literature comes from…Huckleberry Finn” (Trites 144), Twain’s quintessential Coming of Age novel. Twain’s heavy influence in forming the American Bildung tradition comes through Huck, a character tagged by critic Cynthia Wolff as the “American Odysseus” (637). Critic Roberta Trites explains that while in European Bildung there is an emphasis on the romantic maturation of creative spirit, Twain equated American maturation with rebellion and uses his adolescent heroes to critique an imperfect society (Trites x). Thus while most 19th century Bildungsroman involve a romantic transformation into self-awareness within a proper society, Twain’s American Bildungsroman champions an initiate that doubles as social reformer. Like Hemingway years later, Twain’s Coming of Age presents an initiate-turned-adult who can both function within and fix a world that has fallen from grace.
Together, Twain and Hemingway “represent an American tradition, weaving American legends…[and] plunging into human depths” (Cowley 238). Writing more than fifty years after the former, Hemingway’s Bildung protagonists draw heavily off of Twain’s Huck and his transformation. The narration of most Hemingway initiates is first person, similar to Huck (Trites 145), allowing both authors to critique the world with dramatic irony stemming from interpretation of an adolescent mind. The young narrators call out the imperfections of the adult world with childlike ignorance. More importantly, critic Eric Bennett points out that “like Huck, Hemingway’s protagonists [have] noble instincts in a world inhospitable to nobility” (547). Unlike previous Bildung, where characters grow to fit their society, Hemingway adopted Twain’s American Coming of Age as social critique through initiation, having his initiates cope and remain dignified as they transform.
However, like with previous Bildungsroman Hemingway differed from Twain. Hemingway’s lack of viable mentors principally separates the two. Key to Huck’s education is the presence and success of Jim. Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is not considered Bildungsroman precisely because Tom fails to find an appropriate adult mentor (Wolff 643), scrapping the initial plan for a four-part Tom Sawyer journey into adulthood (641). In Nick’s travels prospective mentors almost entirely fail to serve as models. Hemingway’s heroes, Nick especially, stand hopelessly alone (Rivot 49). Due in part to this loneliness, Nick goes on the road in search of surrogate mentors (Hannum 101). But in “The Killers,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and “The Battler,” on the road Nick finds only “mental whores, sinister homosexuals, and professional assassins” (Rivot 95)—and learns only of the cruelty of society (Moddelmog 598). Unlike Huck, Nick has no Jim to steady the journey.
The difference in social context and outlook between Twain and Hemingway gives the reason for Hemingway’s rejection of this Twain-mentor. Even after the Civil War, Twain wrote of an America still fixable (Trites 159). His environment lent itself to not only adventure but also simultaneous education and growth, with a mentor playing an essential role. Hemingway, however, was one with the “Lost Generation.” The country he was born into was riven with wars, civic and domestic violence, and had no dominate definition of right conduct (Rivot 17). Therefore in his creation of Coming of Age work, Hemingway couldn’t simply adapt what was laid out for him from traditional Bildungsroman. Even Twain could not account for such a universally jaded America. But rather than have initiates of the Lost Generation fail, Hemingway used his own innovation where trauma trumped adventure, and where the practice of craft, of something “precise, controlled, and prayerfully iterative,” was the only way to attain a new and mature spiritual balance (Stein 558). This, rather than a mentor or a great adventure, served as the key to a workable adult life. Thus Ernest Hemingway created a Bildungsroman for the Lost Generation. At its center is his earliest reflection of self in Nick Adams, where Nick’s recovery from trauma through craft symbolizes the creation of a mature and capable man in a permanently flawed world.
Bildungsroman of “the Lost Generation”
One of the critical purposes of the Bildungsroman from its roots is the epiphany of initiation, the “moment of insight when reality breaks through the fog of delusion” (Buckley 22). With the world arguably foggier than ever before in the Lost Generation, Hemingway’s Coming of Age works attempted realistically to create such an epiphany for his fictional initiates, as well as for actual adolescents of the era. In the words of Hemingway himself, “a man becomes civilized between the ages of 18 and 25,” and by not going through civilizing experiences, he will “not become a civilized man” (Selected Letters 133). To Gertrude Stein’s attack, then, the men who went to war at this age “missed that civilizing…and thus became a lost generation” (Tavernier-Courbin 70). To justify his own coming of age, Hemingway used his literature to combat this. From this need, the Bildungsroman of “the Lost Generation” was born.
In some ways, Hemingway was largely alone. According to Dolan, most Coming of Age writings of the Lost Generation were either from the early 1920s and codified by visions of heady youth, or written in the late 1920s under the pretense of doom and self-destruction. “Seldom,” he says, do we “[see] the transformation itself” (45). However, Hemingway was not concerned with violence or destruction. Rather than dwell on the war, his work is more concerned with the “aftermath of loss—longing, confusion, and remorse…than it is with the violence [that causes it]” (Adair 294). In Hemingway’s basic pattern, the protagonist is previously exposed to violence, and the story arc focuses on physical and psychological shock, in addition to how the character handles the consequences (Young, “Big World Out There,” 7). Deviating from other postwar writers, Hemingway refused to give up completely on mankind like many had in the Lost Generation. In the words of Earl Rivot, “the radical significance of the individual as an important integer in the struggle for existence, largely denied in the fiction of the 1920s, was a [key] factor in Hemingway’s popularity” (25). Hemingway showed the Coming of Age transformation, and showed how the boys became men.
To follow Bildung tradition while also accurately representing his era’s initiation, Hemingway had to strike a delicate balance. True to “Lost Generation” sentiment—loss of control was a main symptom of WWI “shellshock” (Scott 296)—things “happen” to Hemingway’s protagonists as they push towards adulthood. Hemingway heroes “do not control things” (Adair 294). This helplessness holds most true with Nick, who is often a passive observer to what happens to him (Rivot 56). Lack of control, however contrasts directly with the Bildung ideal of the journey, where it is precisely the character’s deliberate and purposeful action that pushes him to adulthood. But for his initiates, Hemingway did agree on the importance of deliberate action—just not in the context of an adventure, and certainly not through relationships with other characters. In Nick he is willing to show the path “from a young boy to a young man” (Moddelmog 602); he is willing to give a story arc complete with a failed father figure, with escape and travel. But Hemingway rejects the virtue of such adventure, because it lacked a key element in his own coming of age and others of the “Lost Generation”—the experience of trauma. Thus, Coming of Age required an extra step, one that placed a greater emphasis on one’s internal dignity. To grow to full potential in such a terrifying world, dignity and maturation came not from the “passions and illusions of youth” (Rivot 65), but rather by retrieving this dignity after it, along with everything else, is lost. Hemingway refuses to falsify the ideal of dignity in relation to the ugly reality of human condition, “one of his greatest triumphs as a writer” (64). The world is still corrupt around the initiate, but Hemingway allows for “separate positions of moral integrity” (Wesley 10) to create a realistic hero. By truly retrieving their dignity, Nick and all other initiates can pass into the adult world. To do so, Bildung heroes of the Lost Generation must not only experience trauma as part of their adventure, but also truly and honorably move past the experience to become a man. Given his own past, Hemingway saw no other way.
Therefore in Nick Adams, Young claims Hemingway gives a “representative for [the] national passage from the innocence of a shaky pre-war security through the disillusionment of a European ordeal-by-fire, and [a] rejection of what the previous age stood by as ‘normalcy’” (BWOT 17). The pre-war “normal” was no more; therefore a Bildungsroman story arc characteristic of the genre would not fit the new context. So Hemingway gave Nick a journey that was the new normal, one where “perplexities, terrors, and trauma…accompany adolescence” (Rivot 57). In the face of these challenges, Hemingway still embraced conscious individual action to achieve adulthood—but in a coping modem that initiates can control, through precise craft. Starting with The Nick Adams stories, particularly in the post-war “Big Two-Hearted River,” Hemingway first accomplished this Lost Generation initiation. Because of his own trauma, Hemingway could give a similar history to Nick. And because of craft—fishing for Nick and the act of writing itself for Hemingway—man is able, both in Hemingway’s own life and in his Coming of Age literature, to move from a damaged adolescence into adulthood.
The Nick Adams Stories: Fitting into Bildung
To show how The Nick Adams Stories helped codify Hemingway Coming of Age, it is first necessary to fit the stories into the larger context of Bildungsroman. Nick’s journey fits in with much of previous Bildung work. According to Buckley, early experiences of a child “alter the entire direction of his growing mind and…influence for better or for worse his whole maturity” (19). By reading of Nick’s childhood and adolescent experience, we witness this alteration in action. In Nick, Hemingway gives us the life “of an American born with the century, complicated in boyhood and badly hurt in the war, who [comes] to terms with” the world (BWOT 6). Nick’s life journey closely parallels Buckley’s typical Bildungsroman story arc. Nick is born in a rugged American Midwest town in the early 20th century, surrounded by a cowardly father, a sickly mother, and a vexing Indian reservation. At the beginning, in tales such as “Indian Camp,” “Doctor and Doctor’s Wife,” and “Ten Indians,” Nick’s childhood is a story of “a youth marked by…shocked innocence” (Flora 74). He witnesses death, yet denies it (Nick Adams Stories 21); he attempts to educate himself within the home (17); he primitively suffers from a broken heart (33). At an early age, like the classical initiate, Nick chooses to “go with” (26) his father, who both in interactions with other men (24) and his wife (25) is an example of failure and intimidation. Eventually, Nick sees truly and leaves his cowardly father. Now without a model but still at home, Nick attempts to grow within his community in the stories “End of Something” and “Three-Day Blow” by having a “mature” relationship with Marjorie (201) and mimicking his community’s adults by drinking and hunting with his friend Bill Tabeshaw (210). Like Bildung initiates before him though, there is a time limit to Nick’s incomplete adolescence (Young, BWOT 12). As Todd Kontje noted on heroes within the larger literary tradition, while “nature provides the seed,” it is up to the initiate to make a journey where he can “develop his full potential through active engagement with the world around [him]” (4). Thus, it is up to Nick to follow Kontje’s directive and escape.
And escape Nick does, setting out by train and by foot throughout the American Midwest. Like Coming of Age adolescents before him, without parents and “victimized by the adult world” (Moddelmog 597), Nick depends on a “succession of surrogates” through his travels (Hannum 101). However, both in his initial adventures and his adoption of these adults, Nick’s attempt at education and initiation fail. He learns “only of the cruelty of society” (Moddelmog 598) on the road in “The Battler,” “The Killers,” and “The Light of the World”. He encounters mentally insane prostitutes and former boxers (NAS 45, 54), immoral (albeit incompetent) assassins (62-65), and finds no suitable mentors. These experiences serve to make the Coming of Age journey of Nick “abortive” (Rivot 56), as he is just as damaged and lost as he was as a child. Critic William Stein goes a step further, calling “the adventures of Nick Adams [a] chronicle in sterile egoism [where the protagonist] never adjusts to…the naturalistic world of unpredictable evil, corruption, suffering, and death” (555). Stopping here, Nick would represent not Bildung but instead, like Tom Sawyer’s tale that ended in boyhood a case of failed Coming of Age, trapped in an unredeemable America.
But Nick survives “an astonishingly long time” (Rivot 56) in this dangerous world, culminating in the ultimate adventure of the journey—his participation in the unnamed “War” in Italy, detailed by Hemingway in “Now I Lay Me,” “A Way You’ll Never Be,” “In Another Country,” and six short epigraphs between chapters in In Our Time. Once on the front, Nick is “blown up at night and feels his soul leave his body” (Nick Adams Stories 144), removing him from the War (NAS 168) and shattering Nick’s naïve peace of mind (Moddelmog 598). As described by Buckley (18), following the Bildung model, Nick returns to his home country of the American Midwest in “Big Two-Hearted River” after his adventure. Nick’s return, though, has two distinct differences from traditional Bildung—he is not yet an initiated adult, and his childhood community is no longer present. Nick arrives at “a ghost town” (Rivot 82) in Seney, Michigan. In the In Our Time collection, Hemingway ends Nick’s story here, but in Young’s collected Nick Adams Stories he includes published, unpublished, and even disputed stories of Nick as a married writer and father with “Wedding Day,” “On Writing,” and “Fathers and Sons.”
Thus it follows that the key piece of Bildungsroman initiation lies in the celebrated “Big Two-Hearted River,” noted by Stein as the “exception” in The Nick Adams Stories (555). As Trites notes, often the Coming of Age tale focuses intensely on emotional maturation (160), and in “Big Two-Hearted River” we see this maturation its pinnacle for Nick. The story, written during Hemingway’s post-war time in Paris, is “a story…about coming back from war…[with] no mention of the war in it” (A Moveable Feast 76). In the story, Nick, returned from war, meticulously describes a fishing trip not unlike those he fantasized about previously (Nick Adams Stories 145). He sets up camp, eats two feasts to satisfy his hunger, and sleeps for the first time since the War. Most importantly, he fishes the river, reentering the “realism” of his home after a long and trying time away (Hannum 104). Returning broken and all, Nick’s arrival the stream is living proof for the Lost Generation reader that the outside world “can kill you, but it beats you home” (Young, BWOT 19). Nick has survived his journey.
Described as the pinnacle of the Nick Adam’s journey (Stein 555), “Big Two-Hearted River” is unlike any of the other stories. First, the story is broken into two parts. The first part works as “a ritual of preparation, the second a ritual of initiation” (Stein 556). The two parts work partially to convey the importance in Nick’s narrative of each and every action. The story is also one of the first instances of Hemingway’s famed “Iceberg Theory” (Cowley 230), or his writing by omission. In A Moveable Feast (AMF 76) Hemingway describes his usage of the then-unnamed theory right after finishing “Big Two-Hearted River” in the Paris café. Operating under his “new theory” that he could “omit anything if [he] knew what he omitted,” the “omitted part strengthened” the story and caused “people [to] feel more than they understood” (AMF 75). Howard Hannum notes the story as truly “an eight-year work in progress,” as Hemingway worked almost immediately once he returned from war to create Nick Adams’ stories necessary to lead up to it (104). “Big Two-Hearted River” represents the missing piece of all Hemingway’s Nick work, and the moment of initiation that qualifies the work as Bildung.
Arguments against Nick Adams as Bildung, used to keep the works separate from the Coming of Age genre, instead give form to Hemingway’s approach. One of the greatest arguments against The Nick Adams Stories as a work of Bildungsroman is that the work is a series of short stories, and not a novel. However, this distinction instead serves to push Hemingway towards his own tradition. By writing Nick’s tale through short stories instead of a novel, he removes the stories themselves from the actual title of Bildungsroman (which means, literally, novel of formation). The Nick narrative, spread across short story collection and following no chronological order, lacks the linear path characteristic of Bildungsroman (Goodman 30). But by using short, disjunctive stories, Hemingway instead parallels the broken and shattered psyches of the era. Postwar Hemingway alludes to this himself in A Moveable Feast, stating that, though he knows he “must write a novel,” it was “an impossible thing to do” in his current state (AMF 75). The short stories were a necessity for success towards his Lost Generation audience, as, rather than a linear story path, Nick’s stories were presented how memory works (Rivot 57).
Another argument against Hemingway’s form is that he wrote other, Non-Nick Bildung works that fit the previous model. For example, later in “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936), Hemingway places the protagonist in a learning situation, equipped with a mentor, to teach him “the nature of life and how best to live it…[standing as] a story of unequivocable growth” (Rivot 94). Stories like this, Rivot argues, were Hemingway’s prototypical Coming of Age Works, and not Nick’s tale. But to complete the creation of his own take of American Bildung for the Lost Generation, with a context of disillusionment and isolation, the stories necessitated the presence of inescapable trauma. Hemingway bluntly places trauma in Nick’s stories, especially “Big Two Hearted River.” In doing so, he attempts to answer the question central to his Coming of Age tradition—how one can recover, cope, and ultimately grow through their trauma.
Trauma and Craft: Initiation for Nick and the Lost Generation
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places.” ~ A Farewell to Arms
Trauma, The Final Roadblock to Adulthood
In line with the experiences of his generation and with his own war experiences, an experience of trauma as part of initiation is central to the Hemingway Coming of Age journey. Adolescents like Nick could travel and engage nature like their Bildung predecessors, but, due largely to its inescapability in the World War I era, trauma was inevitable as the Lost Generation passed into adulthood. The works, concerned first with fear of loss and then the aftermath of loss (Adair 294), reach their climax only after these torturous experiences.
Central to the trauma of Nick and his other initiates was Hemingway’s trauma itself, through his own wounding and his wartime experiences. In the words of Earl Rivot, if Hemingway’s Coming of Age tales are successful, it is due “to his own human condition, painfully and honestly transmuted…representative of the condition of humanity” (67). Using the autobiographical strains of characteristic Bildungsroman, Hemingway’s heroes at their moment of initiation were much like the author was himself in his own coming of age in Paris—“blown to bits,” and, despite a wife and other writers, very much alone (BWOT 13). Because of Hemingway’s own personal trauma, we get wounded and isolated initiates. Young writes that the author’s “wounding made it necessary [for] fictional returns to scenes of violence as a way of conquering death” (166). He does this most explicitly through his creation of Nick, whose experiences serve as “[Hemingway’s] projection into nightmare possibilities of confusion [and] pain…a sacrificial victim…[so] his creator and the readers can be free of fear” (Rivot 57).
Thus we turn to Nick at the end of his formative journey. Nick not only travels a universal journey in an attempt to become a man but now also becomes a Lost Generation initiate who “edges on the margins of mental collapse,” and like many of them, Hemingway included, returns home “a war veteran who has seen too many helmets full of brains” (Rivot 58). Evidence of Nick’s trauma and its effects are dispersed throughout the stories. Unlike later young adult heroes (the inexplicably castrated Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises as the most obvious), Hemingway actually records Nick’s wounding directly. In an untitled one-paragraph sketch between two stories in “In Our Time” we see Nick in the thick of war, “[leaning] against an abandoned church”, “hit on the spine” and surrounded by death (Nick Adams Stories 143). Aside from this in Nick’s own narrative we are mostly left with the after-effects: first still far from home in “Now I Lay Me” and “In Another Country,” and then later upon his return in “Big Two-Hearted River”. Gone is the naïve boy who was “quite sure he would never die” (NAS 21); gone is the lost initiate who wanted to be a part of the war (150). Now, first still out on the front and then mercifully in a hospital, we have a Nick who has moved past his previous ignorance and has accepted his own mortality (Moddelmog 598).
Now Hemingway’s Bildung hero is true to those shell-shocked in the war, and the after-effects of Nick’s wound dominate all thought. In “Now I Lay Me,” Nick refuses to sleep in the dark, “living with the knowledge for a long time that if [he] ever shut [his] eyes in the dark…[his] soul would go out of his body,” an awareness dating back to when he was “blown up at night and felt it go from him” (NAS 144). These sentiments by Nick draw parallels directly to Hemingway’s letters, where the author told friend Guy Hickok that he had “died” when his trench exploded, “[feeling his soul] come right out of his body” (Cowley 224). Nick’s unnamed older comrade in “Now I Lay Me” attempts to be yet another mentor for Nick, urging him to marry because “marriage would fix everything” (NAS 153). The mentor believes marriage will allow Nick to move on from the war and continue with his life—advice characteristic of the pre-war Coming of Age. Nick though, remains unmarried, “disappointing” this elder (153). A short time after, now completely removed from the war (170), Nick finds himself with similarly aged, similarly injured soldiers in “In Another Country.” However, his trauma separates him from the other solders, who he describes as “hunting-hawks” (171). Unlike them, Nick is “very much afraid to die” (171). Nick rejects the community of those like him (Rivot 96); his fears render him unable to embrace their journey and ideals. Still trapped in a country of war, Nick believes that he has tried and failed on his journey, and dreams only of returning home (144).
It is on this return home, however, that we are able to see just how traumatized Nick is. As he begins his fishing trip in “Big Two-Hearted River,” the final step in his story arc, Hemingway carefully introduces us to the extent of Nick’s mental collapse. Despite Hemingway’s refusal to mention the war, Nick’s instability stemming from its memory is abundantly apparent upon arrival. A complete mental breakdown is “strongly implied” for Nick, his obviously shaky condition the results of his wounds and the explosions that caused them (Hannum 94). The intense concentration Nick pays to his tasks, for example, and his refusal to entertain “bitter” thoughts of past events (NAS 187), according to Rivot, “can only be [read as] a superimposed restraint on an inordinately active mind which is undergoing great stress” (Rivot 81). “Now I Lay Me” introduced us to Nick’s obsessive fears, particularly at night; now blocking-out of such worries makes Nick even more lost. Strengthening this assertion is the fact that, now, “none of Nick’s post-war trauma is noticeably physical” (Flora 64). Though before he was in the hospital and physically traumatized, “Big Two-Hearted River” finds Nick fully recovered physically from the battle wound and now afflicted with an even graver injury—that of total mental collapse (Stein 556).
To convey Nick’s collapse without drawing specifically to war, Hemingway relies on a series of metaphors when Nick first enters Seney. In the description of the countryside, Hemingway gives us a replica of “the terror and horror of primordial chaos” (Stein 559). The previously colorful landscape from Nick’s “Now I Lay Me” fantasies (NAS 145) is replaced by “burned over country” (177), representing the ruination of the war. The destruction is almost total, as even the small brown grasshoppers from his past trips (145) are now black (180)—a minute detail noticed by Nick immediately. When our hero studies the burned grasshopper and wonders how long it will “stay that way” (180), Nick’s thoughts imply meditation for his own recovery, from his blackening (Hannum 107). Even what he can control points to pain—Nick’s pack is “much too heavy” (NAS 178), the pack’s purpose as “the burden of the guilt and shame of his own culture” (Stein 557). Nick is as broken and burned as he was in the war stories, if not more so. “Big Two-Hearted River” ups the ante of Nick’s damage by not even allowing him to express it. He is totally alone—without the “hunting-hawks,” without potential mentors, isolated like many veterans of the Lost Generation. At the end of his attempted journey into manhood, trauma has dropped Nick to his lowest point.
However, this trauma pushes the damaged Nick to his moment of initiation. Not all hope is lost—a fact even Nick is aware of. About the blackened Seney, Nick realizes “it could not all be burned” (NAS 187)—speaking not only for the land but also for his damaged self. Nick has consciously chosen to arrive at the river. Unlike early in his journey, when he was forced off the train in “The Battler” (47), Nick has willfully escaped, leaving the train on his own terms (177). This isolated yet conscious exit is necessitated by his trauma. By this arrival, Hemingway also suggests that the wartime trauma subtly allowed Nick to acquire, for the first time, an appropriate mentor—albeit after his physical journey has come to an end. The Major, whom Nick meets in the hospital in “In Another Country,” represents “an honorable man [Nick] has yet to encounter” (Rivot 62). The Major does “not believe in bravery” (Nick Adams Stories 172), an attribute the damaged Nick does not possess. Much older, and, with his crushed hand (172) just as damaged, the Major gives Nick a model of a similarly traumatized yet successfully initiated adult. The Major, like Nick, is “badly broken…but not destroyed,” giving Nick an “eloquent ideal for heroism” (Rivot 64). The Major contradicts Nick’s earlier advice from “Now I Lay Me”—advice that would have fit snugly with previously Bildung tradition—instead claiming “a man must not marry” (172). Rather than marry, the Major urges Nick to “find things he cannot lose” (173) in order to survive. The Nick in “In Another Country,” not yet a dignified man, is still too fully focused on what he has lost to immediately accept the directive, and nothing within the story itself indicates that Nick has learned anything from the Major (Rivot 97). But I argue Nick did in fact learn, but later—and on his own terms. In line with Bildung heroes before him, the mentor Major’s advice pushes Nick towards recovery and adulthood—he just accepts the mentor relationship after the adult model is physically long gone. With these words in mind, with this attempt to “not place himself in a position to lose, [and instead to] find things he cannot lose” in order to survive (NAS 173) Nick is lead to the river. Thus, the Major articulates the final step towards Hemingway’s addition to Bildung tradition—faced with unavoidable trauma, the initiate become successfully a part of an imperfect world only through precise and perfected craft.
An Answer for the Lost Generation: Initiation Through Craft for Nick
Arriving at “Big Two-Hearted River,” Nick is in the position to serve as a model for the Lost Generation by overcoming his trauma and vaulting into adulthood. Nick is not marrying or joining a community like heroes of Bildungsroman past, or going on yet another wild adventure like Huck Finn. Passing into adulthood holds no such heroic triumph for Nick. Instead, he has arrived, simply, to fish, and fish to perfection. It is in this craft where Nick truly becomes a hero. Hemingway, hardened and disenchanted by the world, endorsed a different, realistic vision of heroism. Caught “in a world in which traditional politics and social values had lost meaning” Hemingway heroes like Nick “seek one’s separate peace” (Miller 102). To do so in post-war America, man must “wage solitary battle against the elemental forces that oppress mankind” (Rivot 26-7), an act that both preserves himself and makes the oppression livable. The magnitude of trauma only serves to enhance the heroism of fighting against a defective society. For Hemingway, the ultimate test “is the degree of stripped courage and dignity a man can discover in himself in moments of despair” (63). By making the world tolerable, despite failure, the Hemingway hero can successfully live. For Nick, this solitary battle comes through the act of fishing, a craft that allows him to uncover courage and dignity lost in the trenches of Italy.
Before Nick arrives at Seney to fish, his long journey thus far fruitless, he “finds himself on the threshold of mature adulthood without any self-identity, wholly estranged from the public community” (Stein 555). In other words, Nick resembled many of the disillusioned youth of the Lost Generation. But in his chosen destination of the river, Nick is finally choosing a self-identity, and his estrangement serves only to strengthen this choice. Trying to cling to what “he cannot lose,” under the Major’s command (NAS 173), Nick turns to fishing. Believing his mentor’s words to be true, Nick “turns to the one great pleasure that has never failed him, the one activity he knows will allow him to escape a world that has proved too much for him” (Moddelmog 606), engaging in a “safe boyhood activity that entirely [excludes] the war” (Hannum 105): fishing. This chosen craft comes as no surprise to those familiar with Nick. In “Now I Lay Me,” imagining fishing is his sole comfort—to keep his soul intact, he sometimes fishes “four or five streams a night” (Nick Adams Stories 145). Recently destroyed by trauma, nothing could provide more solace to Nick than fishing, and so he goes to the river to “come to terms with all the loss he has experienced in the last few years” (600)—loss that currently prevents him from living.
So, for the entirety of “Big Two-Hearted River,” we see Nick meticulously labor and expertly fish. The story is rife with description of the smallest details, on the most mundane of tasks. Before he even does battle with the river, we get a detailed play-by-play of Nick setting up camp (NAS 183), preparing meals (185-7), and readying for fishing. In these acts, we see a Nick that, since he left home, we have yet to be exposed to—one that “[feels] all the old feeling” (178). Hemingway shows Nick “genuinely happy for the first time since we’ve known him” (Hannum 107). Indeed, Nick is described as “happy” multiple times—upon first seeing the trout (NAS 178), after surveying the country (179), when he climbs into his tent (183). For the first time in his life, Nick is safe. His tent, made by his own creation, “is mysterious and homelike” (183) and he realizes that, unlike previous failures in obtaining both a home and happiness, that “this [is] different,” that “things were done” (184). His careful completion of craft and his total control has for a moment given peace to Nick’s broken and fearful psyche. Because of this, for the first time since before “Now I Lay Me” Nick is able to sleep (Hannum 94)—first peacefully in the day from happy exhaustion (NAS 182), and then, at long last, in the darkness, in the home he himself created (187). His previously lost soul is secure because of his handiwork, his previously unsatisfiable hunger quenched. (185).
Nick’s total recovery still eludes him, however, and will continue to do so until he participates in the pinnacle of his adventure—fishing the river. He has arrived to “leave everything behind him, [to leave] the need for thinking” (179). Yet despite his slumber and his feasts, Nick still has difficulty blocking out “bitter” thoughts of loss like that of his old friend Hopkins, whom Nick fought with and “never [saw] again” (187). Thus, Hemingway gives his most scrupulous description in a story teeming with them—Nick’s diligent fishing of the river, spanning the entirety of Part II. Upon stepping into the stream Nick feels “shock” (190), reminding us of Nick’s fragile state, his reaction “a symptom of panic, [the] impulsive recoil” (Stein 559) of a traumatized mind. He is challenged almost immediately upon starting when he encounters a “big trout”—Hemingway applies the word “dangerous” three times as Nick grapples with the fish (NAS 193). Despite his diligent attempt, Nick fails to capture the big trout. The aftermath of his defeated craft nearly returns Nick to previous mental despair: his hands become shaky, the thrill, proving to be “too much” and making Nick “a little sick,” causes him to “sit down” (193). Unlike preparing his meal or setting up his tent, this solitary battle has challenged Nick and forces him to find courage and dignity within the craft itself.
And unlike previous stories both before his wound and after, we see a maturity and resilience in Nick. Due to his experience as a fisherman, he is for the first time in control of both the situation and his emotional state. He refuses to “rush his sensations any,” calming himself and letting the disappointment “leave him” (NAS 194). Settling his mind, Nick baits up and returns to the water, heroically forging ahead and fishing the stream. Through all his work, he manages just “one good trout” (195)—but for Nick that is enough, for he does “not care about getting many trout” (196). What mattered was the act itself. At the story’s closing, Nick considers, then refuses to fish the dark swamp sitting ominously at the end of the river. According to Nick, “fishing the swamp was a tragic adventure [that] he did not want” (198). He resolves that there are “plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp” (199), ending the story with a job completed and a definitive and hopeful future in mind.
In its original ending, “Big Two-Hearted River” closed with Nick consciously reflecting on the meaning of his trip. Upon review Hemingway regarded it was “all shit” and resolved to finish with “straight fishing” (Moddelmog 593). Thus the reader is left to interpret the purpose and ultimate outcome of Nick’s actions. Under previous patterns of the genre, Nick’s return to fishing actually could fit Bildungsroman. At the novel’s end, often the newly-formed adult escapes his environment briefly to an environment akin to his childhood stories, calling to the mind harmony of a “prelapsarian world…an idyllic period” (Goodman 34-5). Like other Bildung heroes as well, Nick’s fishing could be his own attempt “to find purpose in life…through nature” (Stein 556). However, Nick’s fishing in “Big Two-Hearted River,” given its position in his story arc, does not serve this same purpose under Hemingway’s strand of Bildung. Nick is not yet an adult but instead at the threshold (555), and his return is not a brief escape but a necessary coping procedure on his incomplete journey. Hardened by the war, for the Lost Generation there was no return to the prelapsarian world. Instead, the idyllic activity serves to help in fixing both the protagonist and the charred post-war world itself. Put best by Earl Rivot, then, “Big Two-Hearted River” operates on two levels: “first, describing the self-administered therapy of a badly shocked young man, deliberately slowing down his emotional metabolism in order to allow scar tissue to form over wounds of the past…[and] on another level representing the commencement of journey to self…[albeit] highly cautious” (62). This journey both completes Nick’s Bildung and gives a universal representation for the Coming of Age in a world forever changed after the Lost Generation.
The participation in craft works to soothe the damaged Nick and give a model for others like him. In the words of Phillip Young, “fishing provides better therapy than the hospital for Nick…[for Nick], the war in Italy ends in Michigan” (BWOT 14). The “self-administered therapy” described by Rivot comes through the act of fishing. It is not enough to simply escape to Seney (or any part of nature for that matter) as many in the Lost Generation had done. Evidence of the war “is everywhere around him,” but like the trout in the stream Nick steadies himself against this darkness (Hannum 105). He calms his mind in the spiritual participation of fishing. Fishing gives Nick what he has been searching for since his wounding in the war—a sense of control. Adair attributes Nick’s insatiable hunger upon arrival as his need for “his pre-war feeling of control over his emotions and life, the feeling that life is ‘rational’ and comprehensible as it was before the war” (303). To retrieve these feelings, to satisfy the hunger, he does “familiar things, on familiar terrain…[becoming] his formal self…a self lost in the war” (303). Nick does not need to fear all of the horrors that have marred his life thus far when he is fishing—in the river Nick is in control. From this sense of control comes a sense of maturity. Like the Major, dignified despite the loss of his wife at the end of “In Another Country,” by participating in something he cannot lose—his control and mastery of fishing—Nick copes with his trauma and can join the Major as an adult survivor in a non-ideal world.
The ending of “Big Two-Hearted River” to some extent could question the actual healing power of Nick’s venture. His refusal to enter the swamp has been interpreted by some as proof of the story’s ultimate futility, as Nick quitting in the face of “the inevitability of defeat, frustration, and death” (Stein 561). But by refusing to fish the swamp and partake in a “tragic adventure” (NAS 198) I argue we see not the fear of a traumatized mind but rather the maturity of an initiated and realistic, albeit hardened, man. Nick has already gone on his tragic adventure—the war—and he has no need to repeat it. Temporarily free from the trauma it caused, Nick now confidently feels that there “plenty of days” to face such the darkness of the world (199). However, unlike the naïve initiate looking desperately for adventure, like he himself was when he set out on his own, Nick allows himself to be satisfied with what he can control, and with the small victory “one good trout” brings him. This “knowledge of mortal destiny,” this acceptance of satisfactory control by craft, is the “basis of human dignity” for Hemingway (Stein 556).
On a more universal level, for Hemingway Nick’s fishing gives an answer for survival, revival, and initiation in a post-war world. Nick’s revival is not just for his own maturity and survival, but representative for Jake Barnes, for Hemingway, and for all as war-wrecked as he. Deploying himself in the war-blackened Seney, Nick’s job is to renew and fix the world, “for he and the land are under the same curse” (Stein 557). By “revitalizing the Earth”—engaging her through nature, using her blackened grasshoppers, fishing her trout, sleeping on her ground—Nick revitalizes himself (557). Thus it is a task that Nick must do alone, requiring the temporary isolation sought by many in the Lost Generation. Nick does not like “fishing with other men on the river” (NAS 192); even his own voice is “strange” and ultimately rejected (184). This initiation negates previous tradition of the genre, rejecting the necessity of community in initiation. Nick’s battle, like the craft itself, must be solitary to make the converse of Stein’s claims on Nick true—Nick’s personal recovery leads to recovery for a world that “[can’t] all be burned” (179). By carrying the heavy sack for his culture, by bringing order to the chaos and “recreating a world in the image of human reason” (Stein 556), Nick’s initiation gives hope for a livable world. Through the pattern of ritual and of control within his means, Nick transforms and comes to terms with the world—the purpose of Bildung in its purest sense. Thus Hemingway’s mark on Coming of Age tradition, with the addition of trauma-recovery and craft, is complete.
It was Hemingway’s own recovery from trauma, within the larger scope of his own personal coming of age, that allowed him to create Nick and others that represent Hemingway’s Bildung tradition. Like “Big Two-Hearted River,” in Nick’s larger story arc, the main theme of A Moveable Feast within Hemingway’s life is his own healing through craft and his subsequent initiation into the literary and adult world. We can therefore not only authenticate Hemingway’s Bildung tradition through the author’s specific and personal coming of age tale, but A Moveable Feast also serves as a second example of his new approach, with a markedly different but equally elegant craft in the practice of writing. The works themselves are connected, as in A Moveable Feast Hemingway actually describes writing multiple Nick stories (Tavernier-Courbin 94), including “Big Two-Hearted River,” (AMF 76). Similar to the story, a majority of A Moveable Feast is dedicated to Hemingway’s deliberate participation in craft. Just like Nick, the young Ernest and his thoughts are immersed entirely in his craft—often he is “lost in [the] story” he is writing and unaware of his surroundings until after he has finished (AMF 6).
Unlike Nick and fishing though, and thus allowing him to understand its importance, Hemingway was aware of the power of craft. He claims that his “work could cure almost anything” (21) a belief he still held when writing the memoir forty years hence. Hemingway’s wound, “in many ways a personal disaster” also served as a “literary blessing…for him and all who served in World War I” (Cowley 232) as it produced his best work in his attempt to “fish his own mental swamp” (Moddelmog 609). For Hemingway writing was the only viable weapon against the world, and stood as a craft he used to move past his father’s death, his multiple divorces, and his other life tragedies. He sharpened this weapon, and leaned on it heavily for the first time while on the threshold of not only literary greatness but also his own manhood thousands of miles from home in A Moveable Feast. Work through the spiritual craft of writing was his “cure,” pushing Hemingway towards his own personal Bildung destiny as a writer and the voice of the Lost Generation. When he lost this cure, much like we would imagine if Nick lost fishing, Hemingway ceased to live, committing suicide in 1961. His suicide, according to Rivot, was due in large part because “[Hemingway] wrote in order that he could live, and when he could no longer get rid of his [traumas] by writing them out, he ceased to live” (67). The craft of writing gave Hemingway life in the adult world, and the loss of that craft effectively ended it.
But luckily for Nick and for the American Bildung tradition, Hemingway’s influence outlived both his own life and the horrors that shaped him (Bennett 546). The craft that allowed Hemingway to grow and survive aids all American Coming of Age stories in a still gravely damaged world. Nick’s engagement with the Big Two-Hearted River was not a one-time practice. He leaves the river under the condition that there will be “many days to fish the swamp” (NAS 199), a key detail implying battles to be had and fishing to come. Nick’s successful coming of age, contrasting with his author’s, fulfills his role as “an enfleshment of our conscious and unconscious fears to do battle” with the postmordial world we live in as Americans (Rivot 59). For Hemingway, Nick was a “vital defensive weapon in Hemingway’s combat with the universe” (59), and even after this weapon ultimately failed for the author, adolescent readers adopt Nick for a similar purpose. We are forever engaging in solitary battle, even after we become adults. Loss caused by trauma, and the aftereffects of this trauma, is inevitable for anyone growing up in the realistically flawed world. Nick returns to society after his fishing trip, “learning the truth the Lost Generation has scorned: only deprivation and suffering can teach man to love man” (Stein 561). He leaves the river and finally moves on with his life. Craft brings Nick to this conclusion: in the mold of the true Hemingway hero, only in “the solitary battle against” oppression (Rivot 26-7), can boy become man, and man become survivor. Unlike Hemingway, Nick fully moves past his trauma and wins this battle through craft, giving a successful Coming of Age model so that initiates in a lost America wouldn’t fail as his author ultimately did.
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Regarding Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams’ short stories, author Phillip Young asserts Hemingway gives a “meaningful narrative…[where] a memorable character grows from child to adolescent to soldier, writer, and parent” (Preface 6). Assuming this interpretation, The Nick Adams Stories, the first published in the 1925 short story collection In Our Time, should fit into the “Coming of Age,” or Bildungsroman, a long-standing literary tradition. Originating in Germany as early as 1819, Bildung (or “transformational”) works paint a picture of initiation where children (called initiates) journey and “mature into what they are destined to become” (Kontje 2). Over decades and continents, the “Coming of Age” novel adhered to strict story arcs and norms, making works of Bildung easily recognizable. These guidelines became so characteristic, however, that Hemingway works--A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, and especially the short stories on Adams—are often left out of the genre. Critics like Debra Moddelmog argue that Nick’s story, in his journey from childhood to adulthood through travel, adventure, and war, “almost qualifies as a Bildungsroman…but not quite” (602).
What Moddelmog and similar Bildung critics neglect in their reading of Adams, however, is the importance that “time and place” has on Coming of Age works (Kontje 3). Because Bildungsroman traces the growth of a singular character within his environment, historical context is particularly important when studying Bildung. The primary goal of character maturation is to “create order out of chaos and to…develop an identity that meshes with society’s dominant ideologies” (Rishoi 2-3). Additionally, personal experiences hold a salient role. Bildung is described as “fact and fiction intermingled” (Buckley 24); imagination of stories rooted in “self and personal experience” (Tavernier-Courbin xi). Thus, when reading Hemingway it is particularly important to examine his context, his role, and his experiences in early 1900s America. Hemingway’s own coming of age story, the 1964 memoir A Moveable Feast, gives shape to his Bildung work. Hemingway rose to adulthood in “the Lost Generation,” a period of initiation both during and in the aftermath of World War I, and a term Hemingway himself popularized (Dolan 40). In his writing Hemingway became the “spokesmen of the Lost Generation…whose stories fixed the accent of two generations” (Rivot 18). Insistent on “presenting things truly” (Cowley 224), Hemingway’s fiction “embodied the complexity, individuality, situatedness, dignity, and valiant tragedy of human life” as he and some in his era saw it (Bennett 555). These tendencies stemmed directly from Hemingway’s own experiences, and greatly influenced his Bildungsroman.
In Hemingway’s social context, one in which his wounding and similar traumas he witnessed in World War I resonated, previous Bildung tradition did not produce stories the Lost Generation could relate to. Thus, I assert that Hemingway created his own school within Bildung tradition, a Bildungsroman of the Lost Generation—of his lost generation. This generation was not marked by education or adventure but instead trauma. True transformation occurred when one was able to learn to cope with trauma, reflected in the Bildung narrative position. For Hemingway, this trauma was being blown up at night (Cowley 230)—an experience that Young argues had “long-standing literary consequences” (A Reconsideration 168). Instead of reaching adulthood through adventure or marriage, Hemingway’s heroes, and the author himself, could only reach initiation into adulthood by moving past their trauma, through self-discovery and self-revelation, thus creating “an American version of Bildungsroman” (Rivot 79). In order to do this, Hemingway’s initiate turned to craft, perfected acts “universal and symbolic” (51) to embrace not only in order to cope but also to grow. Hemingway’s new approach is best codified in his earliest attempt in the Nick Adams’ stories, culminating in the short story “Big Two-Hearted River.” Through Nick, we see how trauma derailed the Coming of Age of the era’s adolescents, forcing the character to face a fearful adult world. The protagonist follows the advice of his Major; echoing the sentiments of the Lost Generation, the Major asserts “if a man were to lose everything…[to live] he must find things he cannot lose” (The Nick Adams Stories 173). And so the initiate adopts craft over marriage and adventure as a means to reach their greatest potential. For Nick, this craft is fishing in the charred remains of his childhood. For Hemingway himself, in his Coming of Age, his coping and initiation came through the craft of writing, detailed in A Moveable Feast and elsewhere. Making use of the therapeutic power of craft, Hemingway created his own Bildung tradition for an America forever changed by the Great War.
The Lost Generation and Hemingway’s Place
Before studying The Nick Adams Stories, and their effect on Bildung tradition, we first must look at the context in which Hemingway created his titular character. Hemingway’s own coming of age was greatly altered by virtue of reaching adulthood in the aftermath of World War I. Hemingway and his contemporaries who came of age in the era were known as the “Lost Generation.” The term, originally employed by a German Newspaper in 1912, was used exclusively in Britain and France the first years after World War I to describe the artistic cohort that had been reduced by the fighting (Dolan 41). It did not become popularized in America until 1926; it was Hemingway himself that made the phrase international with his paired epigraphs in The Sun Also Rises (41). As time passed, the phrase came to describe anyone who had come of age during the World War I.
What defined this Lost Generation? Central to the idea of the “Lost Generation” was World War I, commonly known as The Great War (1914-18). The people of the generation were young adults marked by “disillusionment,” a disillusionment that “had something to do with the war” (Dolan 42). These sentiments starkly contrasted with the feelings young soldiers had heading into combat. The war was extremely popular among the public at its outset (Watson 2); how people felt about the war during fighting contrasted with this jaded nature of postwar stigma. This disillusionment was most apparent in the returned foot soldiers of World War I—a fraternity to which Hemingway himself belonged. According to war critic Janet Watson, “distance in time and space” from the war, after the soldiers returned from fighting and months passed, made “disillusionment a dominant post-war phenomenon” for young war veterans as well as their non-fighting peers (2). In America, Great Britain, and Germany, the young generation had marched off with images of grandeur and invincibility (20). They returned with their pre-war feelings of immortality lost, a gut-wrenching experience for adolescents and “quite a lot of lose” for those so young (Adair 300).
One large reason for the post-war disillusionment of the Lost Generation was the psychological damage the soldiers had endured in the bloody conflict. With new technology and an emphasis on deadly trench warfare, combatants in World War I saw fighting that claimed more than 37 million causalities (Watson 4). Aside from their physical injuries, soldiers returned home psychologically rocked worse than any previous generation of veterans. Before the diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was prevalent (the term was first coined in 1975 while dealing with Vietnam veterans), the effected were described as having “shell shock” and suffering from what Sigmund Freud termed “war neurosis” (Scott 296). As symptoms of shell shock—fatigue, insomnia, and depression—were mostly seen in the younger soldiers, however, military personnel and governments alike doubted the legitimacy of their suffering. The disillusioned soldier was akin to the weak, furthering the sense of isolation amongst the young combatants (Scott 297). Even worse, many of the traumatized soldiers were returned to war—65% of shell-shocked soldiers resumed front-line fighting after their hospital visit (296).
Therefore, with no help available, many young veterans sought isolation and were “nearly absent of optimism” (Dolan 43) upon their return home. They suffered a “disjunctive return to the civilian world,” isolating themselves and others who came of age during the War (Wesley 2). Post-war poets such as Issac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke, and Wilfred Owen wrote prose of young men whose “flower of youth was destroyed” and of those left at home “[losing] the best of their generation” to death and depression (Roberts 12). Soldiers looked to heal themselves, often engaging in unproductive behaviors like drinking and gambling. Writer Gertrude Stein, a contemporary and friend of Hemingway’s in his post-war Parisian years, described “the young people who served in the war” as having “no respect for anything” and “[drinking themselves] to death” (Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 29) upon their return, a sentiment echoed by many adults who came of age long before the war. Jaded youth traveled and attempted to escape anything that reminded them of the war, drifting with no clear path and avoiding a humanity they regarded as stained. Men returned from fighting to find they no longer had a home (Adair 295). They were not understood by their families and friends, or by the doctors, or even their fellow soldiers. The horrors and trauma of World War I signified “the end of [their] youth, the end of an entire worldview and of feelings that life is rational and controllable” (300). With this innocence lost, war veterans especially buried themselves into a Lost Generation of disillusionment.
Hemingway’s life, since his coming of age coincided with the war, was inextricably intermingled with the Lost Generation. His own life events, both in the war and in its aftermath, fit Watson’s “[dominant] experience of the Great War” (13). In the postwar memoir A Moveable Feast, Stein identifies the author as such in 1922 Paris, saying “[he and] all the young people who served in the war…are [the] lost generation” (Hemingway 29). Even before the war, though, Hemingway acquired some of the Lost Generation disillusionment. As a newspapermen, the author found himself confronted each day with “100 items of petty human behavior, violence, and corruption” (Rivot 42), creating a strong corroboration with the alienation of the era. In 1918 Hemingway volunteered as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross on the Italian Front of World War I—“eagerly, [and] always wanting to be where the action was” (Cowley 232), much like Watson’s excited and honored pre-war soldiers (2). He was wounded by mortar fire in a trench at Fostalla di Paive. The explosion killed three soldiers, one of whom died on Hemingway’s shoulders en route to the command post (Cowley 232). Hemingway’s own wound consisted of 237 steel fragments in his leg, a reminder of an experience that would traumatize him for much of his life and “spooked him until the end” (239).
The Ernest Hemingway we see in his A Moveable Feast, along with the author’s letters to friends concerning the war, gives a concrete example of the postwar, Lost Generation artist. A Moveable Feast presents “a remarkably coherent [representation]…of ‘The Lost Generation’” and gives readers “an indication of projection and mood…[of how Hemingway and others] might remember feeling” (Dolan 39-40). The posthumous story gives us a young Hemingway, married and recently returning from war, conducting his own “escape” by relocating to Paris. The novel never directly gives the young author’s thoughts on the war, suggesting a fear to even consciously remember anything about Italy (Crowley 32). But upon further study we get a real young adult in the author who, as Stein says, embodies “a génération perdue” (A Moveable Feast 29). Mulling over this designation, Hemingway feels a common bond with all of those his age. He wonders if a boy in who Stein grouped him with in the Lost Generation had been “hauled [away]…in a converted ambulance” (AMF 30) like he was. Hemingway feels isolated from others around him, even artists, as he “did not trust anyone who had not been in the war” (82). It is in his 1948 letter to Cowley, though, where Hemingway’s mental instability is most apparent, and shell shock most evident. He writes that “in the First World War I [he] was hurt very badly; in the body, mind and spirit and also morally…hurt all the way through” (Cowley 229-30). Hemingway’s own words illuminate the unspoken trauma in the pages of A Moveable Feast and illuminate an author who truly identified with his readers.
Thus the timing of Hemingway’s 1899 birth, his traumatic experience, and his shell-shocked after-effects gave him a shared history with the Lost Generation. He accepted his place in the context given to him without argument. However, unlike Stein he refused to make his generation unique, claiming that “all generations [are] lost by something” (30). For Hemingway the others who grew up in his era, their “lostness” was due to the trauma of war. Unique or not though, literature changed for good in the Lost Generation. American men became “deeply alienated and disillusioned” because they were unable to live the “myth” handed down to them by men of previous generations (Rishoi 16). The ideals no longer fit them; older generations did not understand their plight. How writing in particular changed was apparent in war rhetoric in comparison to postwar works. The literary postwar experience resembled but little of the poetry, fiction, and non-fiction news written during war years—a notable schism between popular war sentiment and later, embittered reflection on war experiences (Watson 2). Young adults rejected all modes of war writing—literature in particular—because it did not yet classify them as victims of history (Dolan 44). Amongst this artistic uncertainty, Hemingway began his career. He grew up “with no basic relation to any prewar culture, [and] learned to write in a literary environment that could not remember 1913” (Bennett 556). Instead of running from this responsibility, Hemingway met the cries of his generation with open arms. He used his work to become “the spokesman of the Lost Generation” (Rivot 18). Hemingway’s 1926 The Sun Also Rises explicitly uses the signifier of “Lost Generation”; Marc Dolan claims that A Farewell to Arms is as responsible as any historical work for “the myth of Lost Generation” (40). In line with sentiments of his era, Hemingway’s work was “haunted” (Cowley 224) and filled with an overwhelming sense of hostile isolation (Rivot 21). By embracing both his own experiences and the popular feelings of the day, he was able to create a “protomyth” in his stories, where he blended truth to create stories “representative of the Lost Generation” (Dolan 47). Though he refused, in most cases, to mention the war itself (AMF 76), Hemingway’s work evoked how veteran experience felt. The result was literature that not only gave the Lost Generation a voice but also demonstrated an understanding of their post-war sentiments. What distinguished postwar writing was the sense that the youth of the lost generation was now “speaking for itself” (Dolan 43) instead of letting those like Stein speak for them. By bravely writing about the after-effects of the war, Hemingway’s work “provided…an answer to the question of what literature is, a question that concerned many critics after the war” (Bennett 552). He most effectively accomplished this task in his variation of the Bildungsroman tradition.
Bildungsroman literary tradition: From Germany to America to Hemingway
Equally important to Hemingway’s historical context is the previous tradition of Bildungsroman, and the characteristics of the genre Hemingway attempted to work within. Bildung, originally a religious term referring to the active transformation of a man through divine work, became a secular and literary concept in late eighteenth century Germany, coinciding with the increase in production of the novel (Kontje 1). Now secularized, individual development was instead seen as a development from innate potential within persons and through interaction with one’s environment (2), and not through God, shifting the focus from nature to society. The Bildung works began to tackle issues such as cultural norms within the transformation and to explore how these ideologies effected development. Coming of Age novels became a “site of identity production…that both resist and produce cultural identities” (Rishoi 9). The core of the work was still about transformation; however, its purpose became to create a universal experience to which all men could connect (18). Rather than focus on the perfection of a religious coming of age, the novelic Bildung made less certain, but more relatable, claims on the messy transition from boyhood into manhood.
Though Coming of Age tales have different specific storylines, over time Bildung tradition created a series of “norms” in the development of its male protagonists. Works classified as Bildungsroman give a broad outline of a typical plot, and the principal characteristics within the genre (Buckley 17)—including the presence of a mentor figure and the autobiographical elements at work within the writing. The story, usually linear in design, begins in childhood and progresses steadily towards a mature adult (Goodman 30). In this singular journey, most Bildungsroman follow the same general pattern outlined by critic Jerome Buckley. A child grows up in a country or town that constrains him both socially and intellectually. His family, primarily the father figure, is antagonistic to his ambition and forces the child-hero to leave and independently make his way into a new community (Buckley 17). From there, his “real” education begins—he has multiple first encounters (some sexual, some not) that force him to reappraise his values. Once this “painful soul-searching” occurs, the Bildung hero makes accommodations to fit into the modern world and leaves his adolescence behind for maturity, sometimes visiting his old home to demonstrate the wisdom of his choices or the changes he has made (18). However, even at the end of his journey, the hero is “by no means guaranteed a resolution to his problems”—often, the end is found as the “least satisfactory” part of a Bildungsroman (23). The hero may find himself ultimately defeated by larger society or disenchanted with the real world, and the narrative may conclude with an open question of the hero’s final choices. Regardless, his experiences create a moment of initiation. Whether through a sexual act, a heroic journey, or a mentor’s example, the initiate arrives into the adult world. Though Buckley notes that no single novel fits precisely the same pattern, he argues no work within the genre ignores two or three of its principal elements: childhood, conflict between generations, provinciality and larger society, self-education, alienation, and vocation search (18).
Outside the central protagonist in Coming of Age works is the presence of a mentor-figure. As Buckley notes, often the growing child is orphaned or childless (ex: David Copperfield), and if the father is present, he tends to be a villainous character who thwarts the drives and desires of the hero (19). Sometimes the father is the chief reason the boy leaves his home. Thus, once away from his homeland, the protagonist seeks out a substitute parent and a mentor to guide his journey. According to critic Earl Rivot” the Bildung initiate “is placed in a learning relationship with one or more characters…which will teach him about the nature of life, how best to live it, and also most importantly something about himself” (95). An absence of a viable mentor for Nick in Hemingway’s collection creates a large gap (Rivot 49); in traditional Bildung the absence of a mentor would prevent the child from making a successful push (Gottfried-Miles 122). The typical Hemingway hero then, often isolated both by his own choice and because there is no feasible option, would have his journey ultimately prove fruitless.
Finally, Buckley points out the characteristic autobiographical element to the genre of Coming of Age. Though all writing is autobiographical in some sense (Rishoi 2), there are “many degrees of identification between author and hero” in works of Bildung, near autobiographical novels with “fact and fiction inextricably mingled” (Buckley 24). If properly controlled, these autobiographical elements lend a “peculiar vibrancy to character, setting, and incident” (24), strengthening the Coming of Age novel. By using his own experiences as groundwork for character creation, unlike in non-fiction, the author has the freedom to omit and add as he sees fit during “his” own move from boyhood to manhood. The author can assign his hero some of his own acts or feelings, and invent many others to complete his dramatic characterization (26). At first glance, this element would aid any Hemingway-Bildung argument pertaining to Nick—Howard Hannum claims “autobiographical assumption is virtually automatic among those who [study] Nick” (92), and Nick shares both Hemingway’s attitudes and experiences (Flora 69). However, Hemingway’s projection may go too far, even for Bildung. At times, Hemingway loses control over Nick, “identifying too closely…[writing] autobiography instead of fiction” (Moddelmog 591). By identifying with Nick so entirely, Hemingway’s work can be interpreted as too specific to his own life to capture the universality of Bildungsroman.
Despite similarities across Bildung works, contextual differences—time, place, historical events—alter the story arc. In other words, because the Bildungsroman draws upon this autobiographical material (Goodman 29), the author’s context and culture greatly shapes the hero’s journey. Different climates produce different cultures, which create different ideals of initiation into adulthood (Kontje 2). Often those who transgress cultural norms are ostracized and find no place in Bildungsroman works (Rishoi 3). Because across time and space the education of youth is so vastly different, the novel’s structure and the hero’s journey would logically differ (Goodman 29). For example, in novels set in the American West, to be initiated into manhood a boy must “learn to ride a horse, shoot a gun, butcher a steer, and drink whiskey with ranch hands” (38). The social, political, and cultural difference between eras can be seen in the lives of the characters as they try to grow into and “fit” the mold and strict arc. Because of this, Bildung works can both champion and exemplify their society, like many of the European models did, or critique the pitfalls of their world.
Before Hemingway even began writing, America gave twists of its own to Bildung tradition. A catalyst in this molding was Mark Twain. Hemingway himself wrote that “all modern American literature comes from…Huckleberry Finn” (Trites 144), Twain’s quintessential Coming of Age novel. Twain’s heavy influence in forming the American Bildung tradition comes through Huck, a character tagged by critic Cynthia Wolff as the “American Odysseus” (637). Critic Roberta Trites explains that while in European Bildung there is an emphasis on the romantic maturation of creative spirit, Twain equated American maturation with rebellion and uses his adolescent heroes to critique an imperfect society (Trites x). Thus while most 19th century Bildungsroman involve a romantic transformation into self-awareness within a proper society, Twain’s American Bildungsroman champions an initiate that doubles as social reformer. Like Hemingway years later, Twain’s Coming of Age presents an initiate-turned-adult who can both function within and fix a world that has fallen from grace.
Together, Twain and Hemingway “represent an American tradition, weaving American legends…[and] plunging into human depths” (Cowley 238). Writing more than fifty years after the former, Hemingway’s Bildung protagonists draw heavily off of Twain’s Huck and his transformation. The narration of most Hemingway initiates is first person, similar to Huck (Trites 145), allowing both authors to critique the world with dramatic irony stemming from interpretation of an adolescent mind. The young narrators call out the imperfections of the adult world with childlike ignorance. More importantly, critic Eric Bennett points out that “like Huck, Hemingway’s protagonists [have] noble instincts in a world inhospitable to nobility” (547). Unlike previous Bildung, where characters grow to fit their society, Hemingway adopted Twain’s American Coming of Age as social critique through initiation, having his initiates cope and remain dignified as they transform.
However, like with previous Bildungsroman Hemingway differed from Twain. Hemingway’s lack of viable mentors principally separates the two. Key to Huck’s education is the presence and success of Jim. Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is not considered Bildungsroman precisely because Tom fails to find an appropriate adult mentor (Wolff 643), scrapping the initial plan for a four-part Tom Sawyer journey into adulthood (641). In Nick’s travels prospective mentors almost entirely fail to serve as models. Hemingway’s heroes, Nick especially, stand hopelessly alone (Rivot 49). Due in part to this loneliness, Nick goes on the road in search of surrogate mentors (Hannum 101). But in “The Killers,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and “The Battler,” on the road Nick finds only “mental whores, sinister homosexuals, and professional assassins” (Rivot 95)—and learns only of the cruelty of society (Moddelmog 598). Unlike Huck, Nick has no Jim to steady the journey.
The difference in social context and outlook between Twain and Hemingway gives the reason for Hemingway’s rejection of this Twain-mentor. Even after the Civil War, Twain wrote of an America still fixable (Trites 159). His environment lent itself to not only adventure but also simultaneous education and growth, with a mentor playing an essential role. Hemingway, however, was one with the “Lost Generation.” The country he was born into was riven with wars, civic and domestic violence, and had no dominate definition of right conduct (Rivot 17). Therefore in his creation of Coming of Age work, Hemingway couldn’t simply adapt what was laid out for him from traditional Bildungsroman. Even Twain could not account for such a universally jaded America. But rather than have initiates of the Lost Generation fail, Hemingway used his own innovation where trauma trumped adventure, and where the practice of craft, of something “precise, controlled, and prayerfully iterative,” was the only way to attain a new and mature spiritual balance (Stein 558). This, rather than a mentor or a great adventure, served as the key to a workable adult life. Thus Ernest Hemingway created a Bildungsroman for the Lost Generation. At its center is his earliest reflection of self in Nick Adams, where Nick’s recovery from trauma through craft symbolizes the creation of a mature and capable man in a permanently flawed world.
Bildungsroman of “the Lost Generation”
One of the critical purposes of the Bildungsroman from its roots is the epiphany of initiation, the “moment of insight when reality breaks through the fog of delusion” (Buckley 22). With the world arguably foggier than ever before in the Lost Generation, Hemingway’s Coming of Age works attempted realistically to create such an epiphany for his fictional initiates, as well as for actual adolescents of the era. In the words of Hemingway himself, “a man becomes civilized between the ages of 18 and 25,” and by not going through civilizing experiences, he will “not become a civilized man” (Selected Letters 133). To Gertrude Stein’s attack, then, the men who went to war at this age “missed that civilizing…and thus became a lost generation” (Tavernier-Courbin 70). To justify his own coming of age, Hemingway used his literature to combat this. From this need, the Bildungsroman of “the Lost Generation” was born.
In some ways, Hemingway was largely alone. According to Dolan, most Coming of Age writings of the Lost Generation were either from the early 1920s and codified by visions of heady youth, or written in the late 1920s under the pretense of doom and self-destruction. “Seldom,” he says, do we “[see] the transformation itself” (45). However, Hemingway was not concerned with violence or destruction. Rather than dwell on the war, his work is more concerned with the “aftermath of loss—longing, confusion, and remorse…than it is with the violence [that causes it]” (Adair 294). In Hemingway’s basic pattern, the protagonist is previously exposed to violence, and the story arc focuses on physical and psychological shock, in addition to how the character handles the consequences (Young, “Big World Out There,” 7). Deviating from other postwar writers, Hemingway refused to give up completely on mankind like many had in the Lost Generation. In the words of Earl Rivot, “the radical significance of the individual as an important integer in the struggle for existence, largely denied in the fiction of the 1920s, was a [key] factor in Hemingway’s popularity” (25). Hemingway showed the Coming of Age transformation, and showed how the boys became men.
To follow Bildung tradition while also accurately representing his era’s initiation, Hemingway had to strike a delicate balance. True to “Lost Generation” sentiment—loss of control was a main symptom of WWI “shellshock” (Scott 296)—things “happen” to Hemingway’s protagonists as they push towards adulthood. Hemingway heroes “do not control things” (Adair 294). This helplessness holds most true with Nick, who is often a passive observer to what happens to him (Rivot 56). Lack of control, however contrasts directly with the Bildung ideal of the journey, where it is precisely the character’s deliberate and purposeful action that pushes him to adulthood. But for his initiates, Hemingway did agree on the importance of deliberate action—just not in the context of an adventure, and certainly not through relationships with other characters. In Nick he is willing to show the path “from a young boy to a young man” (Moddelmog 602); he is willing to give a story arc complete with a failed father figure, with escape and travel. But Hemingway rejects the virtue of such adventure, because it lacked a key element in his own coming of age and others of the “Lost Generation”—the experience of trauma. Thus, Coming of Age required an extra step, one that placed a greater emphasis on one’s internal dignity. To grow to full potential in such a terrifying world, dignity and maturation came not from the “passions and illusions of youth” (Rivot 65), but rather by retrieving this dignity after it, along with everything else, is lost. Hemingway refuses to falsify the ideal of dignity in relation to the ugly reality of human condition, “one of his greatest triumphs as a writer” (64). The world is still corrupt around the initiate, but Hemingway allows for “separate positions of moral integrity” (Wesley 10) to create a realistic hero. By truly retrieving their dignity, Nick and all other initiates can pass into the adult world. To do so, Bildung heroes of the Lost Generation must not only experience trauma as part of their adventure, but also truly and honorably move past the experience to become a man. Given his own past, Hemingway saw no other way.
Therefore in Nick Adams, Young claims Hemingway gives a “representative for [the] national passage from the innocence of a shaky pre-war security through the disillusionment of a European ordeal-by-fire, and [a] rejection of what the previous age stood by as ‘normalcy’” (BWOT 17). The pre-war “normal” was no more; therefore a Bildungsroman story arc characteristic of the genre would not fit the new context. So Hemingway gave Nick a journey that was the new normal, one where “perplexities, terrors, and trauma…accompany adolescence” (Rivot 57). In the face of these challenges, Hemingway still embraced conscious individual action to achieve adulthood—but in a coping modem that initiates can control, through precise craft. Starting with The Nick Adams stories, particularly in the post-war “Big Two-Hearted River,” Hemingway first accomplished this Lost Generation initiation. Because of his own trauma, Hemingway could give a similar history to Nick. And because of craft—fishing for Nick and the act of writing itself for Hemingway—man is able, both in Hemingway’s own life and in his Coming of Age literature, to move from a damaged adolescence into adulthood.
The Nick Adams Stories: Fitting into Bildung
To show how The Nick Adams Stories helped codify Hemingway Coming of Age, it is first necessary to fit the stories into the larger context of Bildungsroman. Nick’s journey fits in with much of previous Bildung work. According to Buckley, early experiences of a child “alter the entire direction of his growing mind and…influence for better or for worse his whole maturity” (19). By reading of Nick’s childhood and adolescent experience, we witness this alteration in action. In Nick, Hemingway gives us the life “of an American born with the century, complicated in boyhood and badly hurt in the war, who [comes] to terms with” the world (BWOT 6). Nick’s life journey closely parallels Buckley’s typical Bildungsroman story arc. Nick is born in a rugged American Midwest town in the early 20th century, surrounded by a cowardly father, a sickly mother, and a vexing Indian reservation. At the beginning, in tales such as “Indian Camp,” “Doctor and Doctor’s Wife,” and “Ten Indians,” Nick’s childhood is a story of “a youth marked by…shocked innocence” (Flora 74). He witnesses death, yet denies it (Nick Adams Stories 21); he attempts to educate himself within the home (17); he primitively suffers from a broken heart (33). At an early age, like the classical initiate, Nick chooses to “go with” (26) his father, who both in interactions with other men (24) and his wife (25) is an example of failure and intimidation. Eventually, Nick sees truly and leaves his cowardly father. Now without a model but still at home, Nick attempts to grow within his community in the stories “End of Something” and “Three-Day Blow” by having a “mature” relationship with Marjorie (201) and mimicking his community’s adults by drinking and hunting with his friend Bill Tabeshaw (210). Like Bildung initiates before him though, there is a time limit to Nick’s incomplete adolescence (Young, BWOT 12). As Todd Kontje noted on heroes within the larger literary tradition, while “nature provides the seed,” it is up to the initiate to make a journey where he can “develop his full potential through active engagement with the world around [him]” (4). Thus, it is up to Nick to follow Kontje’s directive and escape.
And escape Nick does, setting out by train and by foot throughout the American Midwest. Like Coming of Age adolescents before him, without parents and “victimized by the adult world” (Moddelmog 597), Nick depends on a “succession of surrogates” through his travels (Hannum 101). However, both in his initial adventures and his adoption of these adults, Nick’s attempt at education and initiation fail. He learns “only of the cruelty of society” (Moddelmog 598) on the road in “The Battler,” “The Killers,” and “The Light of the World”. He encounters mentally insane prostitutes and former boxers (NAS 45, 54), immoral (albeit incompetent) assassins (62-65), and finds no suitable mentors. These experiences serve to make the Coming of Age journey of Nick “abortive” (Rivot 56), as he is just as damaged and lost as he was as a child. Critic William Stein goes a step further, calling “the adventures of Nick Adams [a] chronicle in sterile egoism [where the protagonist] never adjusts to…the naturalistic world of unpredictable evil, corruption, suffering, and death” (555). Stopping here, Nick would represent not Bildung but instead, like Tom Sawyer’s tale that ended in boyhood a case of failed Coming of Age, trapped in an unredeemable America.
But Nick survives “an astonishingly long time” (Rivot 56) in this dangerous world, culminating in the ultimate adventure of the journey—his participation in the unnamed “War” in Italy, detailed by Hemingway in “Now I Lay Me,” “A Way You’ll Never Be,” “In Another Country,” and six short epigraphs between chapters in In Our Time. Once on the front, Nick is “blown up at night and feels his soul leave his body” (Nick Adams Stories 144), removing him from the War (NAS 168) and shattering Nick’s naïve peace of mind (Moddelmog 598). As described by Buckley (18), following the Bildung model, Nick returns to his home country of the American Midwest in “Big Two-Hearted River” after his adventure. Nick’s return, though, has two distinct differences from traditional Bildung—he is not yet an initiated adult, and his childhood community is no longer present. Nick arrives at “a ghost town” (Rivot 82) in Seney, Michigan. In the In Our Time collection, Hemingway ends Nick’s story here, but in Young’s collected Nick Adams Stories he includes published, unpublished, and even disputed stories of Nick as a married writer and father with “Wedding Day,” “On Writing,” and “Fathers and Sons.”
Thus it follows that the key piece of Bildungsroman initiation lies in the celebrated “Big Two-Hearted River,” noted by Stein as the “exception” in The Nick Adams Stories (555). As Trites notes, often the Coming of Age tale focuses intensely on emotional maturation (160), and in “Big Two-Hearted River” we see this maturation its pinnacle for Nick. The story, written during Hemingway’s post-war time in Paris, is “a story…about coming back from war…[with] no mention of the war in it” (A Moveable Feast 76). In the story, Nick, returned from war, meticulously describes a fishing trip not unlike those he fantasized about previously (Nick Adams Stories 145). He sets up camp, eats two feasts to satisfy his hunger, and sleeps for the first time since the War. Most importantly, he fishes the river, reentering the “realism” of his home after a long and trying time away (Hannum 104). Returning broken and all, Nick’s arrival the stream is living proof for the Lost Generation reader that the outside world “can kill you, but it beats you home” (Young, BWOT 19). Nick has survived his journey.
Described as the pinnacle of the Nick Adam’s journey (Stein 555), “Big Two-Hearted River” is unlike any of the other stories. First, the story is broken into two parts. The first part works as “a ritual of preparation, the second a ritual of initiation” (Stein 556). The two parts work partially to convey the importance in Nick’s narrative of each and every action. The story is also one of the first instances of Hemingway’s famed “Iceberg Theory” (Cowley 230), or his writing by omission. In A Moveable Feast (AMF 76) Hemingway describes his usage of the then-unnamed theory right after finishing “Big Two-Hearted River” in the Paris café. Operating under his “new theory” that he could “omit anything if [he] knew what he omitted,” the “omitted part strengthened” the story and caused “people [to] feel more than they understood” (AMF 75). Howard Hannum notes the story as truly “an eight-year work in progress,” as Hemingway worked almost immediately once he returned from war to create Nick Adams’ stories necessary to lead up to it (104). “Big Two-Hearted River” represents the missing piece of all Hemingway’s Nick work, and the moment of initiation that qualifies the work as Bildung.
Arguments against Nick Adams as Bildung, used to keep the works separate from the Coming of Age genre, instead give form to Hemingway’s approach. One of the greatest arguments against The Nick Adams Stories as a work of Bildungsroman is that the work is a series of short stories, and not a novel. However, this distinction instead serves to push Hemingway towards his own tradition. By writing Nick’s tale through short stories instead of a novel, he removes the stories themselves from the actual title of Bildungsroman (which means, literally, novel of formation). The Nick narrative, spread across short story collection and following no chronological order, lacks the linear path characteristic of Bildungsroman (Goodman 30). But by using short, disjunctive stories, Hemingway instead parallels the broken and shattered psyches of the era. Postwar Hemingway alludes to this himself in A Moveable Feast, stating that, though he knows he “must write a novel,” it was “an impossible thing to do” in his current state (AMF 75). The short stories were a necessity for success towards his Lost Generation audience, as, rather than a linear story path, Nick’s stories were presented how memory works (Rivot 57).
Another argument against Hemingway’s form is that he wrote other, Non-Nick Bildung works that fit the previous model. For example, later in “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936), Hemingway places the protagonist in a learning situation, equipped with a mentor, to teach him “the nature of life and how best to live it…[standing as] a story of unequivocable growth” (Rivot 94). Stories like this, Rivot argues, were Hemingway’s prototypical Coming of Age Works, and not Nick’s tale. But to complete the creation of his own take of American Bildung for the Lost Generation, with a context of disillusionment and isolation, the stories necessitated the presence of inescapable trauma. Hemingway bluntly places trauma in Nick’s stories, especially “Big Two Hearted River.” In doing so, he attempts to answer the question central to his Coming of Age tradition—how one can recover, cope, and ultimately grow through their trauma.
Trauma and Craft: Initiation for Nick and the Lost Generation
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places.” ~ A Farewell to Arms
Trauma, The Final Roadblock to Adulthood
In line with the experiences of his generation and with his own war experiences, an experience of trauma as part of initiation is central to the Hemingway Coming of Age journey. Adolescents like Nick could travel and engage nature like their Bildung predecessors, but, due largely to its inescapability in the World War I era, trauma was inevitable as the Lost Generation passed into adulthood. The works, concerned first with fear of loss and then the aftermath of loss (Adair 294), reach their climax only after these torturous experiences.
Central to the trauma of Nick and his other initiates was Hemingway’s trauma itself, through his own wounding and his wartime experiences. In the words of Earl Rivot, if Hemingway’s Coming of Age tales are successful, it is due “to his own human condition, painfully and honestly transmuted…representative of the condition of humanity” (67). Using the autobiographical strains of characteristic Bildungsroman, Hemingway’s heroes at their moment of initiation were much like the author was himself in his own coming of age in Paris—“blown to bits,” and, despite a wife and other writers, very much alone (BWOT 13). Because of Hemingway’s own personal trauma, we get wounded and isolated initiates. Young writes that the author’s “wounding made it necessary [for] fictional returns to scenes of violence as a way of conquering death” (166). He does this most explicitly through his creation of Nick, whose experiences serve as “[Hemingway’s] projection into nightmare possibilities of confusion [and] pain…a sacrificial victim…[so] his creator and the readers can be free of fear” (Rivot 57).
Thus we turn to Nick at the end of his formative journey. Nick not only travels a universal journey in an attempt to become a man but now also becomes a Lost Generation initiate who “edges on the margins of mental collapse,” and like many of them, Hemingway included, returns home “a war veteran who has seen too many helmets full of brains” (Rivot 58). Evidence of Nick’s trauma and its effects are dispersed throughout the stories. Unlike later young adult heroes (the inexplicably castrated Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises as the most obvious), Hemingway actually records Nick’s wounding directly. In an untitled one-paragraph sketch between two stories in “In Our Time” we see Nick in the thick of war, “[leaning] against an abandoned church”, “hit on the spine” and surrounded by death (Nick Adams Stories 143). Aside from this in Nick’s own narrative we are mostly left with the after-effects: first still far from home in “Now I Lay Me” and “In Another Country,” and then later upon his return in “Big Two-Hearted River”. Gone is the naïve boy who was “quite sure he would never die” (NAS 21); gone is the lost initiate who wanted to be a part of the war (150). Now, first still out on the front and then mercifully in a hospital, we have a Nick who has moved past his previous ignorance and has accepted his own mortality (Moddelmog 598).
Now Hemingway’s Bildung hero is true to those shell-shocked in the war, and the after-effects of Nick’s wound dominate all thought. In “Now I Lay Me,” Nick refuses to sleep in the dark, “living with the knowledge for a long time that if [he] ever shut [his] eyes in the dark…[his] soul would go out of his body,” an awareness dating back to when he was “blown up at night and felt it go from him” (NAS 144). These sentiments by Nick draw parallels directly to Hemingway’s letters, where the author told friend Guy Hickok that he had “died” when his trench exploded, “[feeling his soul] come right out of his body” (Cowley 224). Nick’s unnamed older comrade in “Now I Lay Me” attempts to be yet another mentor for Nick, urging him to marry because “marriage would fix everything” (NAS 153). The mentor believes marriage will allow Nick to move on from the war and continue with his life—advice characteristic of the pre-war Coming of Age. Nick though, remains unmarried, “disappointing” this elder (153). A short time after, now completely removed from the war (170), Nick finds himself with similarly aged, similarly injured soldiers in “In Another Country.” However, his trauma separates him from the other solders, who he describes as “hunting-hawks” (171). Unlike them, Nick is “very much afraid to die” (171). Nick rejects the community of those like him (Rivot 96); his fears render him unable to embrace their journey and ideals. Still trapped in a country of war, Nick believes that he has tried and failed on his journey, and dreams only of returning home (144).
It is on this return home, however, that we are able to see just how traumatized Nick is. As he begins his fishing trip in “Big Two-Hearted River,” the final step in his story arc, Hemingway carefully introduces us to the extent of Nick’s mental collapse. Despite Hemingway’s refusal to mention the war, Nick’s instability stemming from its memory is abundantly apparent upon arrival. A complete mental breakdown is “strongly implied” for Nick, his obviously shaky condition the results of his wounds and the explosions that caused them (Hannum 94). The intense concentration Nick pays to his tasks, for example, and his refusal to entertain “bitter” thoughts of past events (NAS 187), according to Rivot, “can only be [read as] a superimposed restraint on an inordinately active mind which is undergoing great stress” (Rivot 81). “Now I Lay Me” introduced us to Nick’s obsessive fears, particularly at night; now blocking-out of such worries makes Nick even more lost. Strengthening this assertion is the fact that, now, “none of Nick’s post-war trauma is noticeably physical” (Flora 64). Though before he was in the hospital and physically traumatized, “Big Two-Hearted River” finds Nick fully recovered physically from the battle wound and now afflicted with an even graver injury—that of total mental collapse (Stein 556).
To convey Nick’s collapse without drawing specifically to war, Hemingway relies on a series of metaphors when Nick first enters Seney. In the description of the countryside, Hemingway gives us a replica of “the terror and horror of primordial chaos” (Stein 559). The previously colorful landscape from Nick’s “Now I Lay Me” fantasies (NAS 145) is replaced by “burned over country” (177), representing the ruination of the war. The destruction is almost total, as even the small brown grasshoppers from his past trips (145) are now black (180)—a minute detail noticed by Nick immediately. When our hero studies the burned grasshopper and wonders how long it will “stay that way” (180), Nick’s thoughts imply meditation for his own recovery, from his blackening (Hannum 107). Even what he can control points to pain—Nick’s pack is “much too heavy” (NAS 178), the pack’s purpose as “the burden of the guilt and shame of his own culture” (Stein 557). Nick is as broken and burned as he was in the war stories, if not more so. “Big Two-Hearted River” ups the ante of Nick’s damage by not even allowing him to express it. He is totally alone—without the “hunting-hawks,” without potential mentors, isolated like many veterans of the Lost Generation. At the end of his attempted journey into manhood, trauma has dropped Nick to his lowest point.
However, this trauma pushes the damaged Nick to his moment of initiation. Not all hope is lost—a fact even Nick is aware of. About the blackened Seney, Nick realizes “it could not all be burned” (NAS 187)—speaking not only for the land but also for his damaged self. Nick has consciously chosen to arrive at the river. Unlike early in his journey, when he was forced off the train in “The Battler” (47), Nick has willfully escaped, leaving the train on his own terms (177). This isolated yet conscious exit is necessitated by his trauma. By this arrival, Hemingway also suggests that the wartime trauma subtly allowed Nick to acquire, for the first time, an appropriate mentor—albeit after his physical journey has come to an end. The Major, whom Nick meets in the hospital in “In Another Country,” represents “an honorable man [Nick] has yet to encounter” (Rivot 62). The Major does “not believe in bravery” (Nick Adams Stories 172), an attribute the damaged Nick does not possess. Much older, and, with his crushed hand (172) just as damaged, the Major gives Nick a model of a similarly traumatized yet successfully initiated adult. The Major, like Nick, is “badly broken…but not destroyed,” giving Nick an “eloquent ideal for heroism” (Rivot 64). The Major contradicts Nick’s earlier advice from “Now I Lay Me”—advice that would have fit snugly with previously Bildung tradition—instead claiming “a man must not marry” (172). Rather than marry, the Major urges Nick to “find things he cannot lose” (173) in order to survive. The Nick in “In Another Country,” not yet a dignified man, is still too fully focused on what he has lost to immediately accept the directive, and nothing within the story itself indicates that Nick has learned anything from the Major (Rivot 97). But I argue Nick did in fact learn, but later—and on his own terms. In line with Bildung heroes before him, the mentor Major’s advice pushes Nick towards recovery and adulthood—he just accepts the mentor relationship after the adult model is physically long gone. With these words in mind, with this attempt to “not place himself in a position to lose, [and instead to] find things he cannot lose” in order to survive (NAS 173) Nick is lead to the river. Thus, the Major articulates the final step towards Hemingway’s addition to Bildung tradition—faced with unavoidable trauma, the initiate become successfully a part of an imperfect world only through precise and perfected craft.
An Answer for the Lost Generation: Initiation Through Craft for Nick
Arriving at “Big Two-Hearted River,” Nick is in the position to serve as a model for the Lost Generation by overcoming his trauma and vaulting into adulthood. Nick is not marrying or joining a community like heroes of Bildungsroman past, or going on yet another wild adventure like Huck Finn. Passing into adulthood holds no such heroic triumph for Nick. Instead, he has arrived, simply, to fish, and fish to perfection. It is in this craft where Nick truly becomes a hero. Hemingway, hardened and disenchanted by the world, endorsed a different, realistic vision of heroism. Caught “in a world in which traditional politics and social values had lost meaning” Hemingway heroes like Nick “seek one’s separate peace” (Miller 102). To do so in post-war America, man must “wage solitary battle against the elemental forces that oppress mankind” (Rivot 26-7), an act that both preserves himself and makes the oppression livable. The magnitude of trauma only serves to enhance the heroism of fighting against a defective society. For Hemingway, the ultimate test “is the degree of stripped courage and dignity a man can discover in himself in moments of despair” (63). By making the world tolerable, despite failure, the Hemingway hero can successfully live. For Nick, this solitary battle comes through the act of fishing, a craft that allows him to uncover courage and dignity lost in the trenches of Italy.
Before Nick arrives at Seney to fish, his long journey thus far fruitless, he “finds himself on the threshold of mature adulthood without any self-identity, wholly estranged from the public community” (Stein 555). In other words, Nick resembled many of the disillusioned youth of the Lost Generation. But in his chosen destination of the river, Nick is finally choosing a self-identity, and his estrangement serves only to strengthen this choice. Trying to cling to what “he cannot lose,” under the Major’s command (NAS 173), Nick turns to fishing. Believing his mentor’s words to be true, Nick “turns to the one great pleasure that has never failed him, the one activity he knows will allow him to escape a world that has proved too much for him” (Moddelmog 606), engaging in a “safe boyhood activity that entirely [excludes] the war” (Hannum 105): fishing. This chosen craft comes as no surprise to those familiar with Nick. In “Now I Lay Me,” imagining fishing is his sole comfort—to keep his soul intact, he sometimes fishes “four or five streams a night” (Nick Adams Stories 145). Recently destroyed by trauma, nothing could provide more solace to Nick than fishing, and so he goes to the river to “come to terms with all the loss he has experienced in the last few years” (600)—loss that currently prevents him from living.
So, for the entirety of “Big Two-Hearted River,” we see Nick meticulously labor and expertly fish. The story is rife with description of the smallest details, on the most mundane of tasks. Before he even does battle with the river, we get a detailed play-by-play of Nick setting up camp (NAS 183), preparing meals (185-7), and readying for fishing. In these acts, we see a Nick that, since he left home, we have yet to be exposed to—one that “[feels] all the old feeling” (178). Hemingway shows Nick “genuinely happy for the first time since we’ve known him” (Hannum 107). Indeed, Nick is described as “happy” multiple times—upon first seeing the trout (NAS 178), after surveying the country (179), when he climbs into his tent (183). For the first time in his life, Nick is safe. His tent, made by his own creation, “is mysterious and homelike” (183) and he realizes that, unlike previous failures in obtaining both a home and happiness, that “this [is] different,” that “things were done” (184). His careful completion of craft and his total control has for a moment given peace to Nick’s broken and fearful psyche. Because of this, for the first time since before “Now I Lay Me” Nick is able to sleep (Hannum 94)—first peacefully in the day from happy exhaustion (NAS 182), and then, at long last, in the darkness, in the home he himself created (187). His previously lost soul is secure because of his handiwork, his previously unsatisfiable hunger quenched. (185).
Nick’s total recovery still eludes him, however, and will continue to do so until he participates in the pinnacle of his adventure—fishing the river. He has arrived to “leave everything behind him, [to leave] the need for thinking” (179). Yet despite his slumber and his feasts, Nick still has difficulty blocking out “bitter” thoughts of loss like that of his old friend Hopkins, whom Nick fought with and “never [saw] again” (187). Thus, Hemingway gives his most scrupulous description in a story teeming with them—Nick’s diligent fishing of the river, spanning the entirety of Part II. Upon stepping into the stream Nick feels “shock” (190), reminding us of Nick’s fragile state, his reaction “a symptom of panic, [the] impulsive recoil” (Stein 559) of a traumatized mind. He is challenged almost immediately upon starting when he encounters a “big trout”—Hemingway applies the word “dangerous” three times as Nick grapples with the fish (NAS 193). Despite his diligent attempt, Nick fails to capture the big trout. The aftermath of his defeated craft nearly returns Nick to previous mental despair: his hands become shaky, the thrill, proving to be “too much” and making Nick “a little sick,” causes him to “sit down” (193). Unlike preparing his meal or setting up his tent, this solitary battle has challenged Nick and forces him to find courage and dignity within the craft itself.
And unlike previous stories both before his wound and after, we see a maturity and resilience in Nick. Due to his experience as a fisherman, he is for the first time in control of both the situation and his emotional state. He refuses to “rush his sensations any,” calming himself and letting the disappointment “leave him” (NAS 194). Settling his mind, Nick baits up and returns to the water, heroically forging ahead and fishing the stream. Through all his work, he manages just “one good trout” (195)—but for Nick that is enough, for he does “not care about getting many trout” (196). What mattered was the act itself. At the story’s closing, Nick considers, then refuses to fish the dark swamp sitting ominously at the end of the river. According to Nick, “fishing the swamp was a tragic adventure [that] he did not want” (198). He resolves that there are “plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp” (199), ending the story with a job completed and a definitive and hopeful future in mind.
In its original ending, “Big Two-Hearted River” closed with Nick consciously reflecting on the meaning of his trip. Upon review Hemingway regarded it was “all shit” and resolved to finish with “straight fishing” (Moddelmog 593). Thus the reader is left to interpret the purpose and ultimate outcome of Nick’s actions. Under previous patterns of the genre, Nick’s return to fishing actually could fit Bildungsroman. At the novel’s end, often the newly-formed adult escapes his environment briefly to an environment akin to his childhood stories, calling to the mind harmony of a “prelapsarian world…an idyllic period” (Goodman 34-5). Like other Bildung heroes as well, Nick’s fishing could be his own attempt “to find purpose in life…through nature” (Stein 556). However, Nick’s fishing in “Big Two-Hearted River,” given its position in his story arc, does not serve this same purpose under Hemingway’s strand of Bildung. Nick is not yet an adult but instead at the threshold (555), and his return is not a brief escape but a necessary coping procedure on his incomplete journey. Hardened by the war, for the Lost Generation there was no return to the prelapsarian world. Instead, the idyllic activity serves to help in fixing both the protagonist and the charred post-war world itself. Put best by Earl Rivot, then, “Big Two-Hearted River” operates on two levels: “first, describing the self-administered therapy of a badly shocked young man, deliberately slowing down his emotional metabolism in order to allow scar tissue to form over wounds of the past…[and] on another level representing the commencement of journey to self…[albeit] highly cautious” (62). This journey both completes Nick’s Bildung and gives a universal representation for the Coming of Age in a world forever changed after the Lost Generation.
The participation in craft works to soothe the damaged Nick and give a model for others like him. In the words of Phillip Young, “fishing provides better therapy than the hospital for Nick…[for Nick], the war in Italy ends in Michigan” (BWOT 14). The “self-administered therapy” described by Rivot comes through the act of fishing. It is not enough to simply escape to Seney (or any part of nature for that matter) as many in the Lost Generation had done. Evidence of the war “is everywhere around him,” but like the trout in the stream Nick steadies himself against this darkness (Hannum 105). He calms his mind in the spiritual participation of fishing. Fishing gives Nick what he has been searching for since his wounding in the war—a sense of control. Adair attributes Nick’s insatiable hunger upon arrival as his need for “his pre-war feeling of control over his emotions and life, the feeling that life is ‘rational’ and comprehensible as it was before the war” (303). To retrieve these feelings, to satisfy the hunger, he does “familiar things, on familiar terrain…[becoming] his formal self…a self lost in the war” (303). Nick does not need to fear all of the horrors that have marred his life thus far when he is fishing—in the river Nick is in control. From this sense of control comes a sense of maturity. Like the Major, dignified despite the loss of his wife at the end of “In Another Country,” by participating in something he cannot lose—his control and mastery of fishing—Nick copes with his trauma and can join the Major as an adult survivor in a non-ideal world.
The ending of “Big Two-Hearted River” to some extent could question the actual healing power of Nick’s venture. His refusal to enter the swamp has been interpreted by some as proof of the story’s ultimate futility, as Nick quitting in the face of “the inevitability of defeat, frustration, and death” (Stein 561). But by refusing to fish the swamp and partake in a “tragic adventure” (NAS 198) I argue we see not the fear of a traumatized mind but rather the maturity of an initiated and realistic, albeit hardened, man. Nick has already gone on his tragic adventure—the war—and he has no need to repeat it. Temporarily free from the trauma it caused, Nick now confidently feels that there “plenty of days” to face such the darkness of the world (199). However, unlike the naïve initiate looking desperately for adventure, like he himself was when he set out on his own, Nick allows himself to be satisfied with what he can control, and with the small victory “one good trout” brings him. This “knowledge of mortal destiny,” this acceptance of satisfactory control by craft, is the “basis of human dignity” for Hemingway (Stein 556).
On a more universal level, for Hemingway Nick’s fishing gives an answer for survival, revival, and initiation in a post-war world. Nick’s revival is not just for his own maturity and survival, but representative for Jake Barnes, for Hemingway, and for all as war-wrecked as he. Deploying himself in the war-blackened Seney, Nick’s job is to renew and fix the world, “for he and the land are under the same curse” (Stein 557). By “revitalizing the Earth”—engaging her through nature, using her blackened grasshoppers, fishing her trout, sleeping on her ground—Nick revitalizes himself (557). Thus it is a task that Nick must do alone, requiring the temporary isolation sought by many in the Lost Generation. Nick does not like “fishing with other men on the river” (NAS 192); even his own voice is “strange” and ultimately rejected (184). This initiation negates previous tradition of the genre, rejecting the necessity of community in initiation. Nick’s battle, like the craft itself, must be solitary to make the converse of Stein’s claims on Nick true—Nick’s personal recovery leads to recovery for a world that “[can’t] all be burned” (179). By carrying the heavy sack for his culture, by bringing order to the chaos and “recreating a world in the image of human reason” (Stein 556), Nick’s initiation gives hope for a livable world. Through the pattern of ritual and of control within his means, Nick transforms and comes to terms with the world—the purpose of Bildung in its purest sense. Thus Hemingway’s mark on Coming of Age tradition, with the addition of trauma-recovery and craft, is complete.
It was Hemingway’s own recovery from trauma, within the larger scope of his own personal coming of age, that allowed him to create Nick and others that represent Hemingway’s Bildung tradition. Like “Big Two-Hearted River,” in Nick’s larger story arc, the main theme of A Moveable Feast within Hemingway’s life is his own healing through craft and his subsequent initiation into the literary and adult world. We can therefore not only authenticate Hemingway’s Bildung tradition through the author’s specific and personal coming of age tale, but A Moveable Feast also serves as a second example of his new approach, with a markedly different but equally elegant craft in the practice of writing. The works themselves are connected, as in A Moveable Feast Hemingway actually describes writing multiple Nick stories (Tavernier-Courbin 94), including “Big Two-Hearted River,” (AMF 76). Similar to the story, a majority of A Moveable Feast is dedicated to Hemingway’s deliberate participation in craft. Just like Nick, the young Ernest and his thoughts are immersed entirely in his craft—often he is “lost in [the] story” he is writing and unaware of his surroundings until after he has finished (AMF 6).
Unlike Nick and fishing though, and thus allowing him to understand its importance, Hemingway was aware of the power of craft. He claims that his “work could cure almost anything” (21) a belief he still held when writing the memoir forty years hence. Hemingway’s wound, “in many ways a personal disaster” also served as a “literary blessing…for him and all who served in World War I” (Cowley 232) as it produced his best work in his attempt to “fish his own mental swamp” (Moddelmog 609). For Hemingway writing was the only viable weapon against the world, and stood as a craft he used to move past his father’s death, his multiple divorces, and his other life tragedies. He sharpened this weapon, and leaned on it heavily for the first time while on the threshold of not only literary greatness but also his own manhood thousands of miles from home in A Moveable Feast. Work through the spiritual craft of writing was his “cure,” pushing Hemingway towards his own personal Bildung destiny as a writer and the voice of the Lost Generation. When he lost this cure, much like we would imagine if Nick lost fishing, Hemingway ceased to live, committing suicide in 1961. His suicide, according to Rivot, was due in large part because “[Hemingway] wrote in order that he could live, and when he could no longer get rid of his [traumas] by writing them out, he ceased to live” (67). The craft of writing gave Hemingway life in the adult world, and the loss of that craft effectively ended it.
But luckily for Nick and for the American Bildung tradition, Hemingway’s influence outlived both his own life and the horrors that shaped him (Bennett 546). The craft that allowed Hemingway to grow and survive aids all American Coming of Age stories in a still gravely damaged world. Nick’s engagement with the Big Two-Hearted River was not a one-time practice. He leaves the river under the condition that there will be “many days to fish the swamp” (NAS 199), a key detail implying battles to be had and fishing to come. Nick’s successful coming of age, contrasting with his author’s, fulfills his role as “an enfleshment of our conscious and unconscious fears to do battle” with the postmordial world we live in as Americans (Rivot 59). For Hemingway, Nick was a “vital defensive weapon in Hemingway’s combat with the universe” (59), and even after this weapon ultimately failed for the author, adolescent readers adopt Nick for a similar purpose. We are forever engaging in solitary battle, even after we become adults. Loss caused by trauma, and the aftereffects of this trauma, is inevitable for anyone growing up in the realistically flawed world. Nick returns to society after his fishing trip, “learning the truth the Lost Generation has scorned: only deprivation and suffering can teach man to love man” (Stein 561). He leaves the river and finally moves on with his life. Craft brings Nick to this conclusion: in the mold of the true Hemingway hero, only in “the solitary battle against” oppression (Rivot 26-7), can boy become man, and man become survivor. Unlike Hemingway, Nick fully moves past his trauma and wins this battle through craft, giving a successful Coming of Age model so that initiates in a lost America wouldn’t fail as his author ultimately did.
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