“Scared sick looking at it”: A Reading of Nick Adams in the Published Stories

Abstract

Adams, like Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, or any other major character in American literature, is entitled to a life of his own, but is seldom allowed such imaginative separation from Ernest Hemingway. Autobiographical assumption is virtually automatic among those who write about Nick. On other hand, those who read stories generally become caught up in his experience, and eschew vast Hemingway scholarship, for time, to respond to as his own person. This, of course, is Adams that Hemingway, with his disdain for academics, wanted to present to us. [1] Hemingway's future readers will surely remember him for his short stories, whose style of writing and subject matter won him his initial fame and played such a large part in development of modern short story. Although Hemingway has a thriving society of scholars to celebrate his achievements, he must ultimately depend on general readers for his fame. This latter group is far less likely than scholars to remember his work after 1945, whose structural flaws, intrusive ego, and swollen prose at times make it seem antithesis of early great fiction. The short stories centering on have often been seen as loose configuration of a novel: creative writers from D. H. Lawrence to Joyce Carol Oates have so viewed them. Further, Philip Young's collection, The Adams Stories, though fleshed out with unpublished narratives, offered most of published Nick materials in one volume. A popular college textbook, it has prompted many readers to treat stories as stages of a novel. That is general approach taken here. Camp, with devastating trauma of its Caesarian section and suicide of Indian father, not only scarred Adams for life but also provided Hemingway with framework of his metaphor in developing Nick. The stark realism of first story was not something he used once and discarded. It went a long way toward explaining Nick, and Hemingway was not about to pass over it. What appears at first to be Hemingway's realistic detail in describing Caesarian is in fact basis for an extended system of metaphor, running through all of stories and contributing greatly to their unity. Hemingway returned to details, supplying new ones and integrating those of 1927 (Men Without Women) and 1933 (Winner Take Nothing) with original ones of 1922-25 (In Our Time). He took each important detail of Caesarian and began a sequence of images with it, story by story, in what Frank O'Connor called elegant repetition (159), a series of leitmotifs, of incremental metonymies, whose context s he juxtaposed and superimposed, in ever-complicating patterns, with always true center of experience but never escaping Indian camp. The night of horror inflicted the that never healed; physical wound at Fossalta came too late for such effects. The girl watching a childbirth on Karagatch Road (71) [2] at least got to cry, and might well have recovered, but appears never to have done so. The boy Nick's first sight of a naked woman involved, in rapid succession, full form with its burgeoning abdomen, pubes (resembling a beard), and confusing absence of a penis; then, piercing cut and explosion of blood, laying bare of internal organs, and tissue placed in his basin (68-69). Later, wounded by shrapnel at Piave River (276), he identified with Indian woman being held down for penetration by steel of his father's knife. The Caesarian had to be severely damaging, intensifying his natural fear of castration. Followed immediately by Indian father's gory throat-slashing, Caesarian fixed Nick's association of blood and death with sex, and his obsession with separation of body and soul, particularly at night. While life had come into world from mother's body in birth, it had gone out of father's in suicide. …