Hemingway’s Nick Adams and His Lost “Indian Girl”

Abstract

Two Scribner’s-excised passages from the manuscript of the posthumously published “The Last Good Country” reinforce the importance of the Indian girl Trudy in Hemingway’s fiction and of Prudence Boulton in his life. Both passages underline Nick’s depth of feeling for Trudy and the pain of her loss—a metaphor for the fate of Indians, who “all ended the same way. Long time ago good. Now no good.” But the theme of Indian extinction is itself a metaphor for the power, prominence, and even prevalence of loss in Hemingway’s fiction. Excepting the positive portrayals of Nick Adams and Jake Barnes, Hemingway’s earliest protagonists, loss dominates—in at least half the In Our Time stories, in the bitter conclusion of A Farewell to Arms, and in the four new tales of defeat and death that open The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. Hemingway agrees with Jig that “once they take it away, you never get it back.”