The Light of Illusion in Ernest Hemingway’s
Nick Adams Stories
Master Thesis English Language and Culture
Supervisor: Dr. R. Eaton
University of Amsterdam
29 August 2008
Linda Bogaards
0336394
[email protected]
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The Light of Illusion in Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories
The only writing that was any good was what you made up, what you
imagined. That made everything come true. Like when he wrote “My Old
Man” he'd never seen a jockey killed and the next week Georges Pafrement
was killed at that very jump and that was the way it looked. Everything good
he'd ever written he'd made up. None of it had ever happened. Other things had
happened. Better things, maybe. That was what the family couldn't understand.
They thought it all was experience ... You had to digest life and then create
your own people. (The Nick Adams Stories 237-238)
The previous passage is taken from the short story "On Writing" by Ernest Hemingway. The
story’s protagonist is one of Hemingway's most rounded characters, Nick Adams, who
elaborates on the kind of literature that he would like to write. The story was first published in
1925 as part of "Big Two-Hearted River" in In Our Time, but the critic Philip Young included
it as a separate story in his collection of The Nick Adams Stories. This collection consists of
24 works that were written and published separately between 1920 and 1935. According to
Young, they are all centered around the same character: Nick Adams. It is, however,
debatable whether this is correct because in some of these works, Nick's name is not even
mentioned. Hemingway did not approve of Young’s effort to write a biography about him
during his lifetime, and might also have disapproved of Young's initiative to collect these
stories together. Nevertheless, Young's attempt to find more cohesion in Hemingway's short
work and his thesis regarding The Nick Adams Stories is very interesting.
In his preface to The Nick Adams Stories, Young is careful with his attempt to
associate Nick Adams with Ernest Hemingway himself:
As is true for many writers of fiction, the relationship between Hemingway’s
work and the events of his own life is an immediate and intricate one. In some
stories he appears to report details of actual experience as faithfully as he
might have entered them in a diary. In others the play of his imagination has
transformed experience into a new and different reality. Exploring the
connections between actuality and fiction in Hemingway can be an absorbing
activity, and readers who wish to pursue it are referred to the biographical
studies listed at the end of this preface. But Hemingway naturally intended his
stories to be understood and enjoyed without regard for such
considerations⎯as they have been for a long time. (6)
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In the years following the publication in 1972 of The Nick Adams Stories, however, Young
seemed to disregard his own advice. His thesis is focused on the immediate influence of
Hemingway's life and the representation of Hemingway's own war trauma on the character of
Nick Adams. Although Young's theory generated a change in attitude towards the short
stories of Hemingway, from a simplistic towards a more complex and appreciative
interpretation of his work, this does not mean that critics should lose sight of Hemingway's
ability to create and imagine characters and situations that do not necessarily come directly
from his own experiences. The use of imagination is what separates these two categories of
writing and distinguishes a creative writer from a reporter.
Hemingway not only emphasized the importance of imagination in the craft of writing
but also deemed it the task of every author to “project the truth in such a way that it becomes
a part of the experience of the person who reads it” (Hart 315). According to Carlos Baker,
the first authorized biographer of Hemingway, the author of The Nick Adams Stories seems
to be inspired by Joseph Conrad, who said:
The artist…like the thinker or scientist, seeks the truth…. And art itself may be
defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the
visible universe … It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its
light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life what of
each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential. (qtd. in Baker 70)
Literature, therefore, needs to have a permanent effect on the reader, and according to Conrad
and Hemingway, this can be achieved if the artist’s work is centered around truth. By this,
however, is not meant the kind of truth that a reporter depends on: “Truth in fiction is not
factual truth … but … an account of what could happen within the limits of the possibilities
of life as we know it here and now” (Hart 315).
The notion of illusion plays an important role in this process. Hemingway uses it as
the basis of his literature, namely the illusion that the content of his fiction could happen in
real life but did not actually happen. In his work, therefore, illusion is an essential part of
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authorship. It can be created by means of different techniques. In the collection of the short
stories centered around Nick Adams, Hemingway generates a sense of illusion in his stories
that his readers must overcome to achieve a deeper understanding of his work. He also,
however, places his characters in a world in which illusion plays an important role. The
protagonist of the collection, Nick Adams, goes through different stages in his life. The
question arises whether Ernest Hemingway tried to generate or use different forms of illusions
and what might motivate the use of these forms in the author’s short fiction. In this respect,
Hemingway might have added an extra layer to the structure of his work that requires a more
complex interpretation of his short stories.
The Oxford English Dictionary states that an illusion is “Something that deceives or deludes
by producing a false impression; a deceptive or illusive appearance, statement, belief … An
unreal visual appearance, an apparition, phantom” (“Illusion”). This definition brings up the
opposition between truth and falsehood and might also be called the “illusion of truth.” In
literature, a character can be deceived or can deceive himself by an illusion which does not
correspond with reality. In Hemingway’s short story “Indian Camp” the protagonist is a
young boy named Nick Adams. Nick, his father, and his uncle go to an Indian camp where a
woman is delivering a baby. The father of the baby commits suicide while Nick is in the
camp. Sheldon Norman Grebstein believes that Hemingway uses a toward/away design in this
work to emphasize a change in the character of Nick:
The protagonist, Nick Adams as a boy, travels across a lake with his father and
uncle to an Indian camp and then, after a nightmarish experience there, away
from it by the same route. An Indian hut is the focal point of his experience;
inside it he witnesses the birth of a baby and the simultaneous suicide of the
infant’s father. The movement from outdoors to indoors correlates with the
phases of the journey in that just as Nick’s innocence is tested by what
happens at the destination, nature’s seeming benevolence of lovely lake and
sky is contrasted against the pain and horror contained in a human dwelling.
Although the journey away from the hut occurs in an outdoor setting
sufficiently idyllic to confer upon Nick the illusion of immortality, with the
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sun rising, fish jumping, and water warming, Nick has been forever changed
by the experience at the center of the journey, indoors. (Grebstein 17)
Up to this experience, Nick has been an innocent and naïve boy. The experience in the Indian
camp is Nick’s first encounter with the birth of a child. His father explains to him why the
Indian woman is screaming: “Listen to me. What she is going through is called being in labor.
The baby wants to be born and she wants it to be born” (The Nick Adams Stories 17).
Initially, Nick is curious about his father’s actions, but after he needs to operate on the
woman, the young boy does not watch. “His curiosity had been gone for a long time” (19).
The next day Nick “felt quite sure that he would never die” (21). It seems that he has just
observed death and pain for the first time in his life, and after his father assures him that “not
very many” (20) men kill themselves, Nick believes that it is unlikely that he will die. This
“illusion of truth” might function for Nick as a tool to hold on to his innocence but it also
might be generated due to his naïve and childish perspective and his father’s effort to preserve
the boy’s innocence by mentioning the exceptional nature of this situation. Nick does not
identify himself with the Indian people due to his uncle’s behavior towards them and the
appearance and living conditions of the Indians. As a result, Nick might think that death and
despair happens to them but that he, as a white boy, will not experience it. It could be said
that the protagonist’s “illusion of truth” is, therefore, not a rational form of illusion but
generated from his first confrontation to death after years of innocence.
In 1927, Sigmund Freud published his work “The Future of an Illusion.” It was one of
the first studies on the use and function of illusions in general and focused more extensively
on the illusion of religion. According to Freud, illusions are not errors:
What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes.
In this respect they come near to psychiatric delusions. But they differ from
them, too, apart from the more complicated structure of delusions. In the case
of delusions, we emphasize as essential their being in contradiction with
reality. Illusions need not necessarily be false―that is to say, unrealizable or in
contradiction to reality. For instance, a middle-class girl may have the illusion
that a prince will come and marry her. This is possible; and a few such cases
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have occurred … Thus we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfillment is a
prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to
reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification. (Freud 31)
Illusions are wishes that are not unrealistic but unlikely to come true. In this respect, Freud’s
definition differs from the “illusion of truth” because the latter is always in contradiction to
reality. The greatest illusion of mankind is religion. Freud believes that illusions such as
religion arise out of fear of the unknown:
A great deal is already gained with the first step: the humanization of nature.
Impersonal forces and destinies cannot be approached; they remain eternally
remote. But if the elements have passions that rage as they do in our own
souls, if death itself is not something spontaneous but the violent act of an evil
Will, if everywhere in nature there are beings around us of a kind that we
know in our own society, then we can breathe freely, can feel at home in the
uncanny and can deal by physical means with our senseless anxiety. We are
still defenceless, perhaps, but we are no longer helplessly paralysed; we can at
least react … A replacement like this of natural science by psychology not
only provides immediate relief, but also points the way to a further mastering
of the situation. (16-17)
Mankind is afraid of the immense power and unexpected forces of nature, and to control this
fear it moves instinctively toward the psychological invention of illusion. A key word in his
theory is helplessness. Religion, therefore, is the repression of the fear of nature and of man’s
helpless position in it. Freud claims that the different stages of illusion are similar to the
different stages of obsessional neurosis, which gradually weakens during childhood. Religion
should also be weakened and revised because the future of mankind should be based on
reason and science, not on instinct. Although this is a dangerous task due to the dependence
of human beings on religion, in the long term mankind will be better off knowing the truth.
Freud’s “The Future of an Illusion” was published at the same time as several short stories of
Hemingway that are included in The Nick Adams Stories. It is, therefore, unsure if
Hemingway read this work of Freud. It is known through Hemingway’s letters, however, that
although he disliked intellectuals, he did read Freud occasionally.
In “The Light of the World,” written and published in 1932, Nick and his friend Tom
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take a trip by train. The story includes a fight between two prostitutes, Alice and Peroxide,
who both claim to have had a relationship with a boxer, Steve Ketchel. There has been some
debate among critics about which of these two ladies is telling the truth or whether they are
both liars. According to Robert Fleming, critics have focused too much on the disagreement
of the two prostitutes and the other provocative travelers, while the condition of the young
protagonist Nick and his friend Tom is the true center of the story. Hemingway himself said
that this story was one of his favorite pieces, and the fact that the public rejected it for its
explicit contents made Hemingway prefer it even more. The original manuscript also
indicates that Hemingway changed the original ending of the story and might have done this
to put more focus on the two young protagonists. Fleming argues that the story functions as
an initiation of Nick into adulthood. The disagreement between the two prostitutes, however,
is very important in this initiation. The character of Steve Ketchel is based on a true story,
namely on the American boxer, Stanley Ketchel, who fought Jack Johnson in 1909. The
boxers, supposedly, made a deal before the fight that would allow Johnson to win in the
twentieth round. Both fighters, however, did not want to lose as soon as the fight had begun,
and Ketchel tried to knock Johnson out with a blow in the twelfth round. This was
unsuccessful, and Johnson eventually won the fight after he knocked Ketchel unconscious.
The two prostitutes, however, continuously call their lover Steve Ketchel and it is the cook
who corrects them: “Wasn’t his name Stanley Ketchel?” (The Nick Adams Stories 43). Alice
and Peroxide hear his remark but, nevertheless, decide that “He was no Stanley” (44). They
continue to believe in the illusory identity of their lover and deny the full account of the fight
and the corruptive role of Ketchel in it. Peroxide says:
“It was a trick,” Peroxide said. “That big dinge took him by surprise.
He’d just knocked Jack Johnson down, the big black bastard. That nigger beat
him by a fluke.”
The ticket window went up and the three Indians went over to it.
“Steve knocked him down,” Peroxide said. “He turned to smile at me.”
“I thought you said you weren’t on the coast,” someone said.
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“I went out just for that fight. Steve turned to smile at me and that
black son of a bitch from hell jumped up and hit him by surprise. Steve could
lick a hundred like that black bastard.”
“He was a great fighter,” the lumberjack said.
“I hope to God he was,” Peroxide said. “I hope to God they don’t have
fighters like that now. He was like a god, he was. So white and clean and
beautiful and smooth and fast and like a tiger or like lightning. (The Nick
Adams Stories 44-45)
Alice argues that Peroxide’s love affair cannot be truthful because she herself used to have a
relationship with him. She does not give any evidence for this, although Fleming argues that
her only evidence is that she does not believe that Steve speaks the way that Peroxide
describes. However, it is Peroxide who says about Alice’s story: ‘Steve couldn’t have said
that. It wasn’t the way he talked’ (46). Fleming continues to use this argument to defend
Alice’s story:
Both women share a view of Steve Ketchel that stresses his mythic nature.
Although Peroxide recalls a polite, godlike man who might have been a hero
of a romantic novel and Alice a godlike man in the mold of Ezra Pound’s
Christ in his “The Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” neither differs with the other on
“Steve’s” basic nature. Both link him to God in their statements. Yet of the
two, Alice’s is the closer to reality. (Fleming 288)
Alice’s story is not closer to reality than Peroxide’s and she does not, as Fleming incorrectly
argues, “represent reality” (289). With respect to the name of the historical Stanley Ketchel,
they both present false information, and the cook, who is the most provocative traveler due to
his homosexuality, is the only one who doubts their information by his remark about the
lover’s true name. It is, however, incorrect to judge the prostitutes’ stories as lies because,
except for the error of the name of their lover, their accounts cannot be proven false. Their
statements are highly unlikely to be truthful and are, therefore, associated with the “illusion of
Freud.” Nick and Tom seem to believe the stories of Alice and Peroxide. Nick is, however,
not drawn to the content of their stories but is attracted to Alice’s appearance and her voice.
The narrator of “The Light of the World” is a mature Nick who says several times that Alice
“had a nice voice” (The Nick Adams Stories 41). He also mentions that “You couldn’t believe
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she was real when you looked at her” (The Nick Adams Stories 41) because she is the biggest
woman he has ever seen. This immediate influence of Alice’s appearance on Nick leaves him
unable to judge her story correctly and to fully understand the illusory element of her
statement:
Alice looked at her and then at us and her face lost that hurt look and she
smiled and she had about the prettiest face I ever saw. She had a pretty face
and a nice smooth skin and a lovely voice and she was nice all right and really
friendly. (46)
Nick is drawn not only to the appearance of Alice but is also more interested in her friendly
look and not in “that hurt look” (46), which might indicate that Nick tries to avoid the true
feelings of Alice just as he tries to ignore the cook’s corrective remarks. He is, therefore,
drawn to the illusion of her unlikely account of Steve Ketchel but also to the illusory ‘smile’
of Alice and tries to deny the existence of hurt and pain. The cook represents the truth in this
story due to his comments on the erroneous name of the boxer and due to his homosexuality.
Although this might not be interpreted as something sinful by the cook himself, the boys do
stay away from him when one of the other travelers says: “‘Ever interfere with a cook?’ he
said to me. ‘No’. ‘You interfere with this one,’ he looked at the cook. ‘He likes it.’” (41).
Their attempt to distance themselves from the cook is emphasized at the end of the story
when the cook asks “Which way are you boys going?” (46). Tom’s response “The other way
from you” (46), indicates that Tom and Nick will not follow the cook but will go towards the
illusory road.
The theory of Sigmund Freud on the illusion of religion is an interesting starting point
for reading “The Light of the World” and interpreting Nick’s position in the story. Robert
Fleming believes that the title of the story and the character of Steve Ketchel are associated
with Christianity:
Central to the meaning of the story are the biblical sources to which the title
alludes. Two sources refer to Jesus and a third to his followers. In John 8:12
Jesus says, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in
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darkness, but shall have the light of life.” In John 9:5, Jesus states, “As long as
I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” Finally, in three verses,
Matthew 5: 14-16 Jesus tells his followers, “Ye are the light of the world …
Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and
glorify your father which is in heaven,” Since “light of the world” can refer
either to Jesus Christ or to Christians, the phrase is ambiguous, and it is this
ambiguity that has helped to make “The Light of the World” a difficult story to
interpret. (Fleming 284-285)
Fleming suggests that the title should be interpreted as ironic because the light in the story
represents an illusion, namely the illusion of Steve Ketchel that Nick Adams is drawn to.
Steve Ketchel is introduced as a mythic figure by Peroxide’s statement, and Alice’s account
of her lover intensifies this idea. They both emphasize his goodness. Peroxide says:
Did I know him? Did I know him? Did I love him? You ask me that? I knew
him like you know nobody in the world and I loved him like you love God. He
was the greatest, finest, whitest, most beautiful man that ever lived. (The Nick
Adams Stories 44)
She, therefore, connects the character of Steve Ketchel to goodness, cleanness and whiteness;
his opponent Jack Johnson is portrayed as “a satanic figure” (Fleming 287). If one follows the
biblical interpretation of Fleming, Nick not only falls for an illusion but for the illusion of
religion, mentioned in Freud’s “The Future of an Illusion.” This is emphasized by the use of
indoor and outdoor references in the story. When the boys enter the bar at the beginning of
“The Light of the World,” the bartender hardly speaks to them. When Tom insults the
establishment, he calls the boys “punks” (The Nick Adams Stories 40):
The first scene is also important because it provides the essential clue to the
focus and significance of the second scene; the clue lies in the bartender’s
calling the boys “punks,” 1920s slang that can mean that they are young and
inexperienced, but which can also mean that they are either homosexuals or
catamites, boys used by a pederast. (Fleming 286-287)
One may assume that a bar is a place in which there is light. When the boys decide to leave
the bar, they enter into darkness. The narrator describes this: “Outside it was good and dark”
(The Nick Adams Stories 40). The narrator of the story is Nick Adams because he continually
refers to himself as ‘I’ and he narrates in the past tense which indicates that the reader is
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addressed by a more mature Nick Adams. The statement “Outside it was good and dark” (The
Nick Adams Stories 40) belongs not to the young Nick but to the more mature Nick. The
young Nick and his friend Tom do not appreciate the darkness they find outside and
immediately walk towards the station to get away from it:
“What the hell kind of place is this?” Tommy said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Let’s go down to the station.”
We’d come in that town at one end and we were going out the other. It
smelled of hides and tan bark and the bog piles of sawdust. It was getting dark
as we came in and now that it was dark it was cold and the puddles of water in
the road were freezing at the edges. (40)
They find comfort in the station where the darkness has disappeared and this area is shut off
from it because Nick shuts the door behind him. In the station they are exposed to the light
which symbolizes the illusion of Alice and Peroxide.
In other short stories of Hemingway, this opposition between darkness and light plays
an important role. In “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” the importance of artificial light, in this
case the light of an orderly café, is necessary to overcome the nothingness of life. The clean,
artificial light functions as an illusion because it makes the men forget about the pain and evil
of the dark and gruesome world. The young waiter does not understand the importance of
light, but his elderly colleague does:
Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself. It is
the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You
do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before
a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did
he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was
all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it
needed and a certain cleanness and order … He disliked bars and bodegas. A
clean, well-lighted café was a very different thing. (“A Clean, Well-Lighted
Place” 23-24)
The relation of this short story to “The Light of the World” might be sought in this
juxtaposition between darkness and light. The words ‘cleanness’ and ‘pleasant’ are also used
by Alice and Peroxide in the descriptions of their lover, Steve Ketchel. Ketchel is also
associated with light in relation to his godlike image and behavior, and also due to Peroxide’s
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comparison of Ketchel to “lightning” (The Nick Adams Stories 45). Inside the station, the
boys are captured by the illusion of Steve Ketchel, and this functions as their artificial light.
The darkness versus light connection is related to an inside versus outside pattern. According
to Sheldon Norman Grebstein, this pattern of inside/outside/inside is a pattern of action which
Hemingway frequently uses in his short stories: “This pattern of action, which perfectly
illustrates the basic principle of antithesis, articulates the characters’ conflicting values and
standards of behavior and places them in juxtaposition” (Grebstein 6). In “The Light of the
World” one can argue that illusion and disillusion are juxtaposed. Inside, namely in the bar
and the station, the boys are naïve, inexperienced and likely to be captured by the prostitutes’
illusions and outside they find darkness and a “hell kind of place” (The Nick Adams Stories
40). If one associates the darkness in “The Light of the World” with the darkness outside the
café of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” this outdoor place is connected to the nothingness and
disorder of life:
If it is true of Hemingway’s stories that the connotations of “inside” are often
negative, allied with confinement, entrapment, female domination and male
weakness, it is equally true that the inside scenes in “The Three-Day Blow,”
“Big Two-Hearted river,” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and other
stories communicate positive associations as well: physical well-being,
security, comradeship, safety, cheer – all associations we make with “home”.
(Grebstein 14)
Hemingway seems to have used the inside/outside/inside pattern to portray the element of
illusion in the life of Nick Adams because the inexperienced Nick attributes positive
elements, such as safety, to it. For Nick, the artificial light of an illusion functions as an
escape from the nothingness of life. If one follows Freud’s theory on the illusion of religion,
one might argue that Steve Ketchel represents a godlike figure of goodness that is invented
from a historical figure, Stanley Ketchel. The biblical references of the title intensify the idea
that the illusion of Steve Ketchel fills emptiness, just as the existence of God in religion.
According to Howard Hannum, Christianity fails in the story:
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Critics who have looked for meaning in a specific biblical text have failed to
recognize the extent of Nick’s revolt and the secular character of the world
Hemingway is sending him into. If anything, “The Light of the World” shows
the failure of Christianity for Nick at this time, just as it is failing (and being
failed by) the whores and lumberjacks who call on Christ so often. (Hannum
17)
He claims that Christianity fails because the unlikely stories of Peroxide and Alice are told
with a lot of references to Christ, but the world they live in and the profession of the two
ladies is dark and gruesome. Christianity and its light can, therefore, be related to the red light
of prostitution. Due to the result of the Ketchel versus Johnson fight, Ketchel’s loss might be
viewed “as Christ’s ‘defeat’” (15); but this is unlikely because the story is focused more on
Nick’s attraction to Alice’s statement than on Peroxide’s account. Peroxide is the one who
mentions the fight against Johnson, and Alice calls her “a dirty liar” (The Nick Adams Stories
45). There is, however, no evidence that Peroxide never had a relationship with Ketchel.
Alice never mentions the fight in her narrative and the Christ-like figure of Steve Ketchel,
therefore, does not lose or fail in her narrative. If one looks at Freud’s theory of the illusion of
religion, Christianity actually prevails in the story because Nick and Tom follow Alice’s
illusion and step away from the cook’s corrective and truthful remarks at the end of the story.
Philip Young argues like Hannum that “The Light of the World” is a pessimistic story in
which religion breaks down:
At the end Nick (clearly, though he is not named) and Tom (in life an Indian
boy named Mitchell) seem to have nowhere much to go. It is getting dark, and
as they leave the railway station where they listened to the whores arguing
over which of them had been loved by Ketchel it looks as if the point of the
story is really that the light of the world has gone out. In Winner Take Nothing,
moreover, Hemingway put this story right after “A Clean, Well-Lighted
Place,” the most pessimistic of all his stories (“Our nada who art in nada….”
and so on). With the breakdown of faith and “light” in both stories, it is a good
bet that he thought of these as another pair, thematically related. (Young 34)
It is, however, incorrect to view “The Light of the World” as a story in which faith does not
survive. It does survive because Nick is captured by it. It seems as if Hemingway wants to
suggest that it is part of human nature to look for ways to avoid the fear of nothingness.
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Human beings want to protect themselves from the unpredictable powers of nature, such as
death and despair, and search for methods to escape from these. Nick and Tom do not want to
be confronted with Alice's painful facial expression and consciously decide they will go into
the direction of Alice's illusion. Although Sigmund Freud argues a similar point in "The
Future of an Illusion," namely mankind's constant urge to create illusions to escape from a
feeling of helplessness, he argues that human beings instinctively creates illusions. According
to him, the breakdown or revision of religion would be dangerous due to mankind's
dependence on it. The following stories in The Nick Adams Stories, however, will show that
Hemingway views the creation of illusions as a natural and developing aspect of life and not
as a destructive process.
Hemingway’s short story “The Killers” (1927) can be considered the first story in
which Nick Adams is confronted with disillusionment after his experience in the Indian camp.
Nick is sitting in Henry’s lunchroom when two hired gunmen enter the establishment. They
are looking for the prizefighter Ole Andreson, who often comes in the lunchroom. The
gunmen, Al and Max, decide to threaten George, the owner of the restaurant. When they
realize that Ole is not coming, they leave, and George asks Nick to find the prizefighter and
warn him. Ole Andreson, however, does not seem to be shaken by the gunmen and accepts his
fate. According to Carlos Baker, the character of the prizefighter is half-symbolic and halfnaturalistic:
“Half-symbolic” is an awkward term. What makes it necessary in talking about
stories like “A Pursuit Race” and “The Killers” is that both Andreson and
Campbell are real enough to be accepted in non-symbolic terms. They are
dressed in the sharp vocabulary of the naturalistic writer. We are given (almost
coldly) the place, the facts, the scene, out of which grows, however, an awful
climate of hopelessness and despair. It is impossible to escape the conviction
that the function of these two is to stand for something much larger than
themselves―a whole, widespread human predicament, deep in the grain of
human affairs―with Andreson and Campbell as the indexes. (Baker 123)
Baker claims that both Andreson and Campbell are “victims, the men who have given up the
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fight for life and liberty. Nothing can rouse them anymore” (Baker 123). It seems, however,
that Andreson has not given up the fight for life but has accepted that death is a part of it, and
one should not run away from death or be fearful of it. He does not flee and create an illusion
in which he escapes from gunmen, such as Al and Max, but he embraces the consequences of
his mistake, namely that he “Double-crossed somebody” (The Nick Adams Stories 69).
Although Andreson’s decision may lead to his death, it also seems a somewhat courageous
action. Grebstein believes that:
Even more desolate is the condition of the paralyzed characters in “The
Killers,” “A Pursuit Race,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” all immobilized
by dire wounds of body and spirit. Neither Ole Andreson nor William
Campbell can outrun their pursuers any longer; they are exhausted. The
characters who try to persuade them to move, Mr. Turner and Nick Adams,
retain the will to travel (“I have to go,” Turner says repeatedly; “I’m going to
get out of this town,” Nick declares) – but are a little naïve in the very
possession of it. They have not endured as much as the others; their health also
implies an ignorance of what it means to reach a dead end. And despite their
vitality, they remain futile to alleviate the others’ exhaustion and despair. In a
sense they, too, are immobilized. (Grebstein 21)
Ole Andreson’s passive decision can be viewed as an act of realism. When Nick informs him
about the gunmen, he does not respond at first:
“I was up at Henry’s,” Nick said, “and two fellows came in and tied me
up and the cook, and they said they were going to kill you.”
It sounded silly when he said it. Ole Andreson said nothing.
“They put us out in the kitchen,” Nick went on. “They were going to
shoot you when you came in to supper.”
Ole Andreson looked at the wall and did not say anything … Ole
Andreson rolled over toward the wall.
“The only thing is,” he said, talking toward the wall, “I just can’t make
up my mind to go out. I been here all day.”
“Couldn’t you get out of town?”
“No,” Ole Andreson said. “I’m through with all that running around.
(The Nick Adams Stories 67)
The prizefighter is uncertain what to do. His paralysis seems to result from a feeling of
hopelessness and the weariness of “running around” (67). Hemingway created a paradoxical
image of the character of Andreson. He is “a heavyweight prizefighter and he was too long
for the bed. He lay with his head on two pillows” (67). This man seems to be a strong, big
16
man whose appearance may be said to symbolize true masculinity. Mrs. Bell, however,
mentions that “You’d never know it except from the way his face is … He’s just as gentle”
(The Nick Adams Stories 68). Ole Andreson, however, may seem to be a nice and gentle man
but he did, however, come into contact with criminals. His paradoxical image, therefore, also
suggests a kind of illusion. His speech and behavior in front of Nick suggest helplessness
which surprises Nick. He tries to ‘activate’ the passivity of Andreson after he “looked at the
big man lying on the bed” (67). He informs the prizefighter about the incident at the
lunchroom and continues to give him more details when Andreson does not respond. The
prizefighter thanks him for coming but Nick carries on to persuade Ole to some form of
action by adding: “Don’t you want me to go and see the police” (67), “Isn’t there something I
can do” (67), “Maybe it was just a bluff” (67) and “Couldn’t you fix it up some way?” (67).
Andreson, however, decides that “After a while I’ll make up my mind to go out” (68) and
Nick leaves. At this point in the story the true focus becomes clear. Although Andreson seems
to be the cause of the incident in the lunchroom, it is Nick’s response towards the situation
which is at the true core of “The Killers.” This is also argued by Cleanth Brooks and Robert
Penn Warren:
The first reader we may say, feels that “The Killers” is the gangsters’ story―a
story of action which does not come off. The second and more sophisticated
reader interprets it as Andreson’s story, though perhaps with some wonder that
Andreson’s story has been approached so indirectly and is allowed to trail off
so irrelevantly. In other words, the reader is inclined to transpose the question,
What is the story? into the question, Whose story is it? When he states the
question in this way, he confronts the fact that Hemingway has left the story
focused not on the gangsters, nor on Andreson, but on the boys at the
lunchroom … So, of the two boys, it is obviously Nick on whom the
impression has been made. George has managed to come to terms with the
situation. By this line of reasoning, it is Nick’s story. And the story is about the
discovery of evil. The theme, in a sense, is the Hamlet theme, or the theme of
Sherwood Anderson’s “I Want to Know Why” (Brooks and Warren 188-189)
The setting of the story is somewhat similar to the setting in gangster movies because the
image of the two gunmen is associated with danger and darkness:
17
“I’ll take ham and eggs,” the man called Al said. He wore a derby hat
and a black overcoat buttoned across the chest. His face was small and white
and he had tight lips. He wore a silk muffler and gloves.
“Give me bacon and eggs,” said the other man. He was about the same
size as Al. Their faces were different, but they were dressed like twins. Both
wore overcoats too tight for them. (The Nick Adams Stories 59)
The portrayal of the gunmen, their speech and the reactions of George and Sam suggest evil
and death. Al and Max keep this image intact because they do not take their gloves off while
they eat. Nick is inexperienced in a world which contains this kind of movie-like evil. This is
indicated when Max calls Nick a “bright boy” (62): “‘Talk about something else. Ever go to
the movies?’ ‘Once in a while.’ ‘You ought to go to the movies more. The movies are fine for
a bright boy like you.’” (62-63). Hemingway might have used this reference to gangster
movies in “The Killers” to introduce the reader to the central concept of this story, namely
illusion. Robert Hart observed the use of the illusion of truth in Hemingway’s work and one
can relate this to the making of movies as well:
If, as every artist must, he draws on his experiences with real life persons and
places, he nevertheless transmutes them into his own creations. As a literary
artist, he attempts to create the illusion of real-life experience; he does not, as a
reporter does, attempt to present a copy of real life. (Hart 315)
Movies, like literature, can be considered as art based on illusion. A story should present the
viewer or reader with an image that looks like it could happen in real life. The reference to
gangster movies in “The Killers”, however, can be connected to the form of illusion that
Freud describes in his theory.
According to Freud, a civilization can only exist when there are individuals who
recognize human passions, and the need to control them in order to perpetuate a stable
civilization. The majority of a civilization needs to trust these individuals and use their
knowledge to build a healthy foundation for their society. A human being, however, has the
natural tendency to behave antisocially, and it is the function of civilization to correct this
kind of behavior:
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It is in keeping with the course of human development that external coercion
gradually becomes internalized; for a special mental agency, man’s super-ego,
takes it over and includes it among its commandments. Every child presents
this process of transformation to us; only by that means does it become a moral
and social being. Such a strengthening of the super-ego is a most precious
cultural asset in the psychological field. (Freud 11)
If, however, this antisocial behavior is not transmuted during childhood, it can be corrected by
the use of “measures of coercion and other measures that are intended to reconcile men …
and to recompense them for their sacrifices” (10). The use of laws or prohibitions and
governmental regulations concerning the division of wealth in a community are examples of
this control. There are, however, groups and individuals who are unable to control their
emotions, and who can rarely be persuaded by society to change their behavior, such as
murderers, rapists and cannibals. Freud also mentions the narcissistic effect of pride on a
society:
People will be only readily inclined to include among the psychical assets of a
culture its ideals―its estimates of what achievements are the highest and the
most to be striven after … The satisfaction which the ideal offers to the
participants in the culture is thus of a narcissistic nature; it rests on their pride
in what has already been successfully achieved. (13)
Civilization tries to avoid the destruction of society by these individuals by, for instance,
imprisonment, and in some exceptional cases it will be possible to repress their passions by
the use of therapy. This is important because there needs to remain a stable basis in a
community. According to Freud, one of the methods to protect society from being at the
mercy of passions is “in its religious ideas in the widest sense―in other words … in its
illusions” (14). The characters of Max and Al seem to fall into the category of individuals
who are unwilling to live civilized lives. They are gunmen who make a living by killing
people. Not only does Max confront Nick with the illusory function of movies, he and Al also
represent a world of evil that Nick has never been exposed to. This world might be associated
to the kind of evil described by Sigmund Freud. It is dark and gruesome, like the appearance
and behavior of the gunmen who curse, insult, and threaten Nick, George, and Sam. The
19
character of Max might also be associated with narcissism and pride because we are told
several times that he “looked in the mirror” (The Nick Adams Stories 61). George and Sam
are intimidated by the men, but the incident does not seem to be their first introduction to the
world of evil. This is also indicated by George’s comments at the end of “The Killers”:
“Did you tell him about it?” George asked.
“Sure. I told him but he knows what it’s all about.”
“What’s he going to do?”
“Nothing.”
“They’ll kill him.”
“I guess they will.”
“He must have got mixed up in something in Chicago. (68-69)
The gunmen seem to be conscious of their antisocial position in society because they tease
Nick with his inexperience and make fun of his shocked response. George is aware of the
consequences of Andreson’s involvement with criminals, but Nick is relatively naïve. Ole
Andreson functions as a connection for Nick between the civilized and the evil world. Up to
this incident in Henry’s lunchroom, Nick’s life had been affected by the illusion of truth and
the illusion of Freud. The character of Andreson is Nick’s initiation into an evil world and his
first disillusionment. Nick, however, does not understand Andreson’s refusal to continue
“running around” (67) and he decides to flee from the scene:
“I’m going to get out of this town,” Nick said.
“Yes,” said George. “That’s a good thing to do.”
“I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s
going to get it. It’s too damned awful.”
“Well,” said George, “you better not think about it. (69)
Nick is unable to think about or stay in this situation. His confrontation with Andreson and
the world of evil has made him aware of the important escapist function of illusions in his
life. He is, however, not able to accept the existence of individuals such as the gunmen and
refuses to face reality. As a result, he tries to escape from the knowledge of their existence,
possibly moving towards another illusion. Hemingway seems to suggest that if one gives up
the creation of illusions, one gives up in life. Sigmund Freud argues, however, that a life
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influenced by illusion leads to the denial of evil, an evil represented by the gunmen in "The
Killers", but also towards a world based on irrationality and the innate and natural fear of
human beings. This fear works from the inside out and forms the basis of society. He also
believes that society should be influenced and guided by the "intellectual awakening" (Freud
39) and reason of certain leaders. Hemingway claims that it is understandable but also
necessary to create illusions. He views illusions as tools to avoid paralysis and fear in life. An
illusion works as a rational method, created by reason, and is highly influenced by the outside
world. Nick pities Andreson but their dialogue has also made him aware of his own creation
of illusions. Through a confrontation with the outside world, Nick consciously decides that if
he wants to continue his life, illusions are necessary.
In 1952, Carlos Baker published the first authorized biography of Hemingway. In
Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, Baker discusses the term ‘informed illusion’ in relation to
two novels. Colonel Cantwell, the hero of Across the River and Into the Trees, is a soldier
who experienced evil in the First World War. His character “is a tense Manichean opposition
between the tough and the tender” (Baker 268). The Colonel believes that although a human
being can be affected by tragic and brutal events, positive qualities of life can survive:
“How much of all that is good here can survive the onslaughts of evil without
being spoiled?” The answer, supplied by the Colonel, is that very much can
survive―courage, love, a chivalric code, generosity, the sense of beauty and
the sense of the ridiculous, and the capacity for soundly based belief … Of
utmost importance is the capacity for soundly based belief, for what might well
be called the desirability of informed illusion. “Every day is a disillusion,”
says the very young Countess. “No,” says the Colonel, flatly. “Every day is a
new and fine illusion. But you can cut out everything phony about the illusion
as though you would cut it out with a straight-edge razor.” (273)
Informed illusion is a mechanism which an individual can use to fill up a hole that has been
created by disillusionment. To create an informed illusion is a conscious act, not an
instinctive one, as with the illusion of truth and the illusion of Freud. These two forms of
illusion are inflexible. They cannot be replaced easily by a substitute, while informed illusions
21
are expected to be replaced after a period of time. They are based on a conscious belief and
instigated by a rational decision:
the necessary thing to retain, after the loss of any illusion, is the capacity for
belief which made the original illusion possible. It may be that all honorable
men are not honorable. It is even very likely. This does not, however, add up to
anything like permanent disillusionment with mankind. One gets out the
straight-edge razor and performs a delicate operation. Afterwards, if the
operation has been well done, the patient will recover. (Baker 273)
Although it is very well possible that the next illusion will fall apart as well, the basis of belief
needs to remain intact. It can be concluded from Colonel Cantwell’s words that if one loses
this “capacity for belief” (273) one will lose hope for the future and will give up the fight
against the evil or nothingness. The character of Ole Andreson might be an example of an
individual who has lost his ability to believe and therefore loses the capacity for informed
illusion. Bickford Sylvester uses Baker’s theory to discuss Santiago’s faith in The Old Man
and the Sea that “depends upon ‘informed illusion’” (Sylvester 473). He argues that many
critics incorrectly believe that “Hemingway’s ‘view of the world has gone soft’” (Sylvester
477) in this novel. Sylvester believes that Santiago’s informed illusions are based on a belief
in the use of rituals and a refusal to look back in life. The protagonist of the novel is an old
fisherman who is visited every night by a young boy named Manolin. Each night they have a
conversation about baseball, fishing, and cooking. Their time together becomes a ritual until
Santiago leaves for a fishing trip. This trip seems to be a turning point in the novel due to
Santiago’s change in attitude after he returns:
When the final exchange begins Santiago has at last lost some of his hope.
“Now we fish together again,” says Manolin, as the old man awakes in his
shack the morning after his return. “No. I am not lucky,” Santiago answers; “I
am not lucky anymore” … As he left his boat the night before, the old man had
paused: “It was then he knew the depth of his tiredness. He stopped for a
moment and looked back and saw in the reflection from the street light the
great tail of the fish standing up well behind the skiff’s stern” … This was the
only time in his journey that the old man had looked back, except when his
forward progress depended on it … In doing so he had violated the system of
iconography set up before him within the book … He had “sinned” not
enough to prevent his fighting his way up the hill to his shack, but enough to
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weaken his resolution. (qtd. in Sylvester 474)
Santiago’s attitude in life used to be to look forward and to refuse any kind of evaluation or
retrospection. In a sense, he repudiates the act of thinking because this might make him
incapable of creating informed illusions to manage the evils of life. If one wants to survive
traumatic experiences in life and wants to retain features such as pride, courage and hope, it is
necessary to continue to move and not look backward. After Nick Adams’s encounter with
disillusionment, represented by the character of Ole Andreson and generated by the world of
evil of the gunmen, Nick flees from the town. The incident, however, has made him aware of
the existence of illusion. When Nick becomes conscious of the existence of it, he can start to
discover the necessity of illusion. As a result, he can begin to use it in a rational manner, in
the form of informed illusions.
In “The Last Good Country” Nick has to flee from his home because two men are
looking for him. Apparently, Nick shot a deer, which is a “violation of the law games” (The
Nick Adams Stories 103). He and his sister, Littless, watch the men at the house and decide to
walk to a secret place in the forest. During their adventure, there is a continuous creation of
informed illusions, and these are continually broken down into disillusionment. Early on in
the story, Nick talks about his wish to kill the two men:
“I’d like to have the rifle and go down now to the edge of the timber
and kill both of those bastards while they’re on the dock and wire piece of iron
on them from the old mill and sink them in the channel.”
“And then what would you do?” his sister asked. “Somebody sent
them.”
“Nobody sent that first son of a bitch. (74)
Nick is involved in a situation in which he feels threatened and feels the need to convince
himself of his superiority over the two men. His statement, however, is an informed illusion
because he knows that he will not be able to stand up to them and his words are, therefore,
only a way to keep up his courage, to make his sister feel safer, and to convince himself that it
was a good idea to bring her along. However, he soon realizes that it was not a good idea to
23
take her with him because he gradually feels more responsible for her. Littless talks about
marrying him under the “Unwritten Law” (The Nick Adams Stories 122). Her fantasies of
their future life together are childish and unrealistic, and this is emphasized by Nick’s
continuous act of reminding her to go to the bathroom and his constant assurance that she is
safe. When Littless is asleep, Nick watches her and understands that “I must take good care of
her and keep her happy and get her back safely” (118). She should not have come with him
because she is too young and naïve. This last instance of thinking is quite rare in the story
because there are hardly any evaluative moments in “The Last Good Country”. It is Littless
who reminds Nick of “the Evans boy” (128) who might know about their hiding place:
“Does the Evans boy know?”
“Not him,” Nick said. But then he thought about it and it made him feel
sick. He could see the Evans boy.
“What’re you thinking, Nickie?”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
“You were thinking. You tell me. We’re partners.”
“He might know,” Nick said. “Goddamn it. He might know.”
“But you don’t know that he knows?”
“No. That’s the trouble. If I did I’d get out.” …
“I’m grateful. I knew it anyway. Only I’d stopped thinking about it. I
have to think about things now the rest of my life.”
“You always thought about things.”
“Not like this.”…
But Nick was trying to accept it now and think his way all the way
through it. He must not get in a panic about it. Nothing had changed. Things
were just as they were when he had decided to come here and let things blow
over. (128-129)
Nick has tried to repress the thought of the possibility that Evans knows their secret place. He
attempted not to think about it because it would mean the end of their calm and peaceful stay
in the forest. Littless’ questions, however, force him to let go of the informed illusion he had
created concerning Evans and their hiding place. He immediately, however, creates a new
illusion because he does not want to panic and wants to convince himself that nothing has
changed. This is untrue because his illusion has broken down, but due to his belief in the
creation of illusions, he is able to avoid permanent disillusionment.
24
It is unclear from Colonel Cantwell’s theory of informed illusions what exactly
constitutes this belief. If one observes Nick Adams’ change after his introduction to
disillusionment in “The Killers,” it might be said that to generate informed illusions as an
individual, one needs to observe disillusionment in another man’s life. Ole Andreson
mentions that he does not want to flee anymore but this can only result in his death. Nick is
disgusted by the thought of his death and has been taught, by Andreson’s behavior, that the
only way to avoid it is to flee and create illusions as Andreson used to do. The fear of
disillusionment and death might make it necessary to create informed illusions. In “The Last
Good Country,” Nick never looks back. The story consists of dialogues and descriptions but
there are only a few instances of quoted thought. These moments, however, are short and only
function as new attempts to generate informed illusions. At the end of the story, Littless needs
to be re-assured of the peacefulness of the journey:
“Listen, Littless, don’t ever talk about killing and remember I never
talked about killing. There isn’t any killing nor ever going to be any.”
“True?”
“True.”
“I’m so glad.”
“Don’t even be that. Nobody ever talked about it.”
“All right. I never thought about it nor spoke about it.”
“Me either.”
“Of course you didn’t.”
“I never even thought about it.”
No, he thought. You never even thought about it. Only all day and all
night. But you mustn’t think about it in front of her because she can feel it
because she is your sister and you love each other. (The Nick Adams Stories
131)
Littless and Nick have talked about killing the men but agree to repress this fact. Nick has,
however, thought about it “all day and all night” (131) but does not want to mention this to
his sister. As one can observe from this excerpt, Nick also tries to fool himself by repressing
the thought of killing. It seems unlikely that he would actually kill the men because this
would mean the end of his freedom. He generates this illusion to repress the act of thinking,
and it functions as a way to escape an internal state of panic and confrontation with his sister.
25
It also might indicate a repression of the fear of imprisonment.
“Now I Lay Me” is a short story which consists of a dialogue between Nick and a
fellow soldier, framed by a monologue of Nick. Nick has just been shot in the spin, as
described in “Nick sat against the Wall.” He is lying in a room in the dark, and another soldier
in the room is awake as well. Nick is scared to fall asleep because “I had been living for a
long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my
soul would go out of my body” (The Nick Adams Stories 144). According to Carl Ficken,
there is a gradual development in the use of point of view in The Nick Adams Stories. He
claims that the older Nick gets, the more subjective the narration becomes:
As Nick matures and goes through his initiations, the point of view becomes
increasingly subjective. The stories immediately following the wound show a
disordered state of mind and are presented through a complicated narrative
perspective. (Ficken 111)
It is true that Nick’s thinking pattern is very chaotic in this story, and both his pain and his
insomnia can be said to cause this. Ficken, however, also argues that Nick has the ability to
evaluate his past and current situation somewhat analytically in the story:
And, in this story, Nick does probe more deeply into his own thoughts, he is
more analytical, there is a greater sense of awareness in the introspection. At
times, he is simply reflecting … but at other times, he is more than a
reflector― “On those nights I tried to remember everything that had ever
happened to me, starting with just before I went to the war and remembering
back from one thing to another.” It is that very backward movement which
characterizes this story in theme and narrative technique, for Nick is trying to
dig into his own mind enough to understand some things about his
parents―some things which he has not heretofore been able to understand,
which have been an unabsorbed part of his “education” … which have
contributed to his present condition. (109)
Nick’s analysis is not, however, an organized analysis but is characterized by chaos, as Nick
has once again been confronted with disillusionment. This time, however, he does not observe
disillusionment, as in “The Killers,” but he experiences it himself in the war. Not only is he
disillusioned by his face-to-face confrontation with death, but Nick has also been brought up
with an illusory image of war.
26
In “A Way You’ll Never be” Nick finds several dead soldiers lying in a field. Their
belongings are scattered around them:
There were mass prayer books, group postcards showing the machine-gun unit
standing in ranked and ruddy cheerfulness as in a football picture for a college
annual; now they were humped and swollen in the grass; propaganda postcards
showing a soldier in Austrian uniform bending a woman backward over a bed;
the figures were impressionistically drawn, very attractively depicted and had
nothing in common with actual rape in which the woman’s skirts are pulled
over her head to smother her, one comrade sometimes sitting upon the head.
There were many of these inciting cards which had evidently been issued just
before the offensive. Now they were scattered with the smutty postcards,
photographic; the small photographs of village girls by village photographers,
the occasional pictures of children, and the letters, letters, letters. (The Nick
Adams Stories 155)
Nick realizes that the postcards portray an incorrect image of war. Nick’s disillusionment is
also accentuated by the realization that American soldiers are treated differently than
European soldiers. When Nick meets three Italian soldiers from Milan, he describes the
difference in medals between himself and them:
The boys at first were very polite about my medals and asked me what I had
done to get them. I showed them the papers, which were written in very
beautiful language … but which really said, with the adjectives removed, that I
had been given the medals because I was an American. After that their manner
changed a little toward me … because it had been different with them and they
had done very different things to get their medals … sometimes, after the
cocktail hour, I would imagine myself having done all the things they had done
to get their medals; but … I knew that I would never have done such things,
and I was very much afraid to die, and often lay in bed at night by myself,
afraid to die and wondering how I would be when I went back to the front
again. The three with the medals were like hunting-hawks; and I was not a
hawk, although I might seem a hawk to those who had never hunted; they, the
three, knew better and so we drifted apart. (171)
Nick has not done anything heroic in the war and recognizes that his medals give an illusory
image of his achievements. Nick seems to be continuously disappointed in himself for getting
hurt and not having done anything that mattered in Italy. His war experience has only brought
him fear and trauma. His monologue in “Now I Lay Me” does not seem to be a regular
analysis of his situation, but his thoughts seem to be related to moments in his life in which he
was unable or unwilling to think. Richard Hovey also mentions the repressive function of
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Nick’s memories and thoughts, and believes that Nick does not analyze himself but goes
through a psycho-analytical process. Nick represses his need to sleep and has “different ways
of occupying myself while I lay awake” (The Nick Adams Stories 144). He would think of
fishing or “tried to remember everything that had ever happened to me” (146). According to
Richard Hovey, Nick’s fear of sleep implies “traditionally death’s second self” (Hovey 182):
In other words, the threat of death is linked with sleep, Nick’s fear of dying
linked with his fear of losing consciousness. And the only defense―so the
hero or patient believes―is not to let himself go, to keep a rigid hold on his
consciousness. (182)
Nick’s memories of his childhood suggest a chaotic self-analysis and “The title also implies a
longing to return to the imagined security of early childhood” (182) and a suggestion towards
a psycho-analytical situation in the story:
So, as his words come out, the linking of thought with thought and image with
image and memory with memory and all their related emotions, appears to be
totally without order. Yet, as the trained psychoanalyst listens, in time all this
outpouring begins to afford him clues; these clues eventually merge into
patterns; and the patterns point to deeper feelings and half-forgotten
recollections of what is bothering his patient and what these surface ramblings
disguise but do not totally conceal. (183)
Hovey seems to argue that although Nick uses his thoughts to avoid sleep and to repress his
fear of death, he needs to go through this process to work through his trauma. By way of
speech, Nick brings some memories and feelings to the surface. There are, however, also
moments of resistance in the protagonist’s narrative:
This impeding of Nick’s fishing fantasies is unmistakably analogous to
“resistance” in the psychoanalyst’s patient. When the analysand stops talking,
the flow of words, ideas and recollections is blocked by some competing or
conflicting currents of feeling. Such resistance alert the psychoanalyst because
it usually indicates that some still unrevealed part of the psyche may be
pushing toward consciousness and meeting resistance, some feelings and
memories which lie deeper and are harder to dig up. (184)
In “Now I Lay Me” the reader is in the position of psychoanalyst to whom Nick addresses
himself. His monologue is, however, interrupted by his dialogue with John, his fellow soldier.
This seems to be a turning point in the story. Nick has just mentioned the destructive role that
28
his mother played in both his father’s and his own life:
About the new house I remembered how my mother was always cleaning
things out and making a good clearance. One time when my father was away
on a hunting trip she made a good thorough cleaning-out in the basement and
burned everything that should not have been there. When my father came
home and got down from his buggy and hitched the horse, the fire was still
burning … My father looked at the fire and kicked at something. (The Nick
Adams Stories 147)
According to Ficken, this incident can be viewed as Nick’s first wounding or “the child’s
feared wound of emasculation” (Ficken 186). His second wound is his injury on the
battlefield. In his dialogue with John, Nick is encouraged by him to get married:
“You got to get all right. A man can’t get along that don’t sleep. Do
you worry about anything? You got anything on your mind?”
“No, John, I don’t think so.”
“You ought to get married, Signor Tenente. Then you wouldn’t worry.”
“I don’t know.”
“You ought to get married. Why don’t you pick out some nice Italian
girl with plenty of money. You could get any one you want. You’re young and
you got good decorations and you look nice. You been wounded a couple of
times. (The Nick Adams Stories 151-152)
Some critics believe that Nick does not follow John’s advice due to the destructive image he
has of his own mother. There seems, however, to be another reason why Nick refuses to
marry. John claims that Nick should get married because it will make him forget his worries.
This is emphasized by Nick’s statement at the end of the story:
He came to the hospital in Milan to see me several months after and was very
disappointed that I had not yet married, and I know he would feel very badly if
he knew that, so far, I have never married. He was going back to America and
he was very certain about marriage and knew it would fix up everything. (153)
Nevertheless, the kind of marriage John suggests is based on money, not on love: “Well, you
marry the one with the most money. Over here, the way they’re brought up, they’ll all make
you a good wife” (152). It seems that John uses marriage as a repressive tool to forget about
the worries of life. It brings him money but also enables him to repress his unresolved
anxieties. Nick, however, refuses to do so because he knows that marriage will not solve all of
his problems. He has viewed his parents’ marriage and its destructive effect on his father.
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Nick observed Ole Andreson’s situation and has experienced his own disillusionment during
the war. The fact that he decides not to get married has always been viewed as symptomatic
by critics, but in my view, Nick decides not to forsake his problems by creating illusions such
as a ‘happy’ marriage but to address them alone. As a result, he is able to start the process of
working through his trauma and leaves open the possibility of the survival of certain qualities
such as “the capacity of soundly based belief” (Baker 273). This belief can then function
again as the basis for informed illusions.
This process is demonstrated by two stories. In “Big Two-Hearted River,” Nick goes
back to his former fishing stream and starts his ‘healing’ process by both the remembrance of
his former trips as a child and connecting those to his current journey: “Nick’s heart tightened
as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling” (The Nick Adams Stories 178). Nick is
confronted with things that have been wounded just as he has been, namely “the burned-over
stretch of hillside” (177) and the black grasshoppers. Nevertheless, they have all survived and
need to regain their strength. His recovery is also suggested by his ability to sleep: “He felt
sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep” (187). Sheridan Baker
focuses on the relation between Nick’s state of mind and the flowing river:
In the dark, half-light, Nick feels that swamp fishing would be “a tragic
adventure.” He doesn’t want any more fishing that day. But as he leaves he
looks back. “There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the
swamp.” He feels, and we feel with him, that he will manage all of his own
murky entanglement, that he can survive the tragic depths. (Sheridan Baker
152-153)
Nick knows that one day he will be able to fish in the deeper parts of the swamp, but he is not
yet ready for it. There is, however, never any reference to Nick fishing the depths of the
swamp again, either in this or in any other Nick Adams story. The reader, therefore, never
knows whether Nick has fully worked through his trauma. The trip and the refusal to fish in
the deeper parts of the river in the dark, however, do suggest that Nick is trying to regain the
positive qualities of life, such as the ability to create informed illusions.
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In Hemingway’s story “On Writing” Nick's attitude towards illusion seems to have
developed itself. He believes that it is necessary as a writer to present an illusory situation:
Nick in his stories was never himself. He made him up. Of course he’d never
seen an Indian woman having a baby. That was what made it good. Nobody
knew that. He’d seen a woman having a baby on the road to Karagatch and
tried to help her. That was the way it was … He always worked best when
Helen was unwell. Just that much discontent and friction. Then there were
times when you had to write. Not conscience. Just peristaltic action. Then you
felt sometimes like you could never write but after a while you knew sooner or
later you would write another good story. (The Nick Adams Stories 238)
Nick suggests that imagination is an essential part of authorship because he says: “The only
writing that was any good was what you made up, what you imagined” (237). He even claims
that “Writing about anything actual was bad. It killed it” (237).
The protagonist also develops a new interest in bullfighting. In an article on the role of
bullfighting in Hemingway’s “The Capital of the World,” Stephen Cooper describes the
illusory image that bullfighters need to uphold:
The effort to maintain a certain decorum and dignity is illustrated by the sick
matador who carefully launders his own blood-soaked handkerchiefs in an
effort to hide his illness. The cowardly matador tries to maintain the illusion of
his early success by retaining “many of the hearty mannerisms of his days of
success” … (Cooper 307)
The bullfighters keep up an illusion of courage, pride and beauty which is unlike reality. It is
striking that Nick is drawn to this world of illusion because it suggests that he is interested in
the function of it in one’s life. According to Lawrence Stanley and Robert Hart, “On Writing”
is an important story in the body of Hemingway’s work because it reveals something about
his opinion of the craft of writing. It also might tell us more about why Hemingway uses the
different forms of illusion described above. This more mature Nick in "On Writing" not only
consciously creates illusions but also recognizes them in other people's lives. In this respect,
Hemingway indicates that the creation of illusions is actually initiated by reason and
rationality and not, as Freud suggests, an unconscious and instinctive act. Although they both
emphasize the escapist function of illusions and the fearful nature of their existence, their
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opinions differ on the origin of them. Nick Adams' position as an artist, however, also gives
him the gift of observing and recognizing illusions and the ability to show his audience the
influence of illusion in one's life.
The Nick Adams stories may have been written as experimental pieces to create a kind
of fiction similar to Paul Cézanne’s painting. Lawrence Broer argues that Hemingway was
highly inspired by Cézanne’s work, and that this inspiration also has an effect on the character
of Nick Adams and his future as a writer:
Hemingway had said it before―prose was architecture, not interior decoration.
In A Moveable Feast, he wrote, “I was learning something from the painting of
Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make
stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them … The “real
thing,” that which produced beauty and great emotion, was not the simple
reproduction of people and events, the “objective data of experience,” … but
that which the artist makes in rearranging conventional ways of seeing the
world. (Broer 133)
Many critics have discussed Hemingway’s writing style. Due to the repetition of words,
syntactical patterns and situations, omission of seemingly critical elements of a story, such as
a beginning and ending, and his overall writing style which appears to be simplistic but is
highly complex, Hemingway can be considered to use an illusory mode of fiction. The theory
of omission seems to be important because it forces the reader to look for clues in the rest of
the text and to use his imagination to construe the entire story. Research on the original
manuscripts of some of Hemingway’s work has shown the continuous polishing that his
works underwent. He may, initially, create a closed ending to his work but this can eventually
be replaced with an open ending. Lawrence Stanley believes that Hemingway wanted to
capture the kind of immediacy and minimalism in his art that he saw in Cézanne’s paintings.
In “On Writing,” Nick Adams mentions Cézanne’s work: “Cezanne started with all the tricks.
Then he broke the whole thing down and built the real thing. It was hell to do. He was the
greatest” (The Nick Adams Stories 239). Stanley summarizes Hemingway’s own problem
with fiction: “that the intrusive subjectivity of reflection threatens the conditional object-state
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of writing itself, since reflection rises out of actual (and remembered experience) … rather
than the craft itself” (Stanley 210). So how can a writer write an actual story without the
interference of the “subjectivity of reflection” (210)? Paul Cézanne experimented with the
complexity of human vision and the subjective element of it through “the exploration of
binocular vision” (“Paul Cézanne”). He used minimalism as a means to bring the actual form
and space between objects to the human eye:
We see two different views simultaneously; Cézanne employed this aspect of
visual perception in his painting to varying degrees. The observation of this
fact, coupled with Cézanne’s desire to capture the truth of his own perception,
often compelled him to render the outlines of forms so as to at once attempt to
display the distinctly different views of both the left and right eyes. (“Paul
Cézanne”)
When a human being perceives a picture with both eyes open, the result is an illusory or
distorted vision due to the blending of the right and the left eyes’ visions. Cézanne wanted to
make the viewers of his paintings aware of this phenomenon by showing them both
perspectives. Minimalist and detailed shapes needed to be generated to reduce the natural
forms of the objects to “geometric essentials” (“Paul Cézanne”). If one views the collection of
Nick Adams stories as the development, not just of an individual or war veteran, but as the
development of a writer, one may consider Nick’s confrontation with illusions and
disillusionment as a process to become aware of the subjectivity of life. Paul Cézanne's view
of self-deception shows great similarities with Hemingway's analysis of the role of illusion in
an artist' life and work. Genuine fiction can only be created by an author who is consciously
aware of self-deception and can create illusions himself. Both Cézanne and Hemingway
believe that illusions originate from reason, not instinct, and seem to address the role of
illusion from an artist's point of view. In this respect, their views differ from Freud who
believes illusions are dangerous because they are not created by reason and deny the existence
of evil in the world. He believes illusions, such as religion, need to be eliminated while
Cézanne and Hemingway view artists as the ideal people to confront their readers with their
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dependence on illusions and the necessity of this process in life. Nick Adams develops from
an innocent and unconscious dreamer to a rational and conscious creator of illusions. If Nick
Adams wants to grow into the ideal writer that he describes in “On Writing,” he needs to
become aware of the natural human need for self-deception. He must realize that one of the
most important tools of an author is his imagination and he must use this to confront his
readers with illusion. It is only with this realization that a writer can start to overcome
subjectivity and create genuine fiction.
Although Philip Young has made a debatable decision by collecting The Nick Adams Stories,
the collection does offer an interesting opportunity to look at the short fiction of Ernest
Hemingway. The focus of many critics has been on the development of the character of Nick
Adams as a traumatized war veteran, but many have forgotten Nick’s ambition to become a
good writer. The creation of the illusion of truth, the illusion of Freud and informed illusions
all seem to be motivated by fear, or as a way to escape the nothingness and evil of life. In the
case of informed illusions, one might also argue that permanent disillusionment will cause the
destruction of the basis of belief, which is necessary to create illusions. Nick Adams also uses
the generation of illusions to repress the act of thinking and to avoid a state of panic in his
mind. Hemingway could have used Nick’s confrontation with the elements of illusion and
disillusionment as a means to portray a possible development of a man into an artist.
Although it is uncertain whether Nick is able to actually use this knowledge into his fiction,
he does become conscious of the influence of a human being’s subjectivity and the necessity
of literature to strip the subjective perception off the object of writing and create “the real
thing” (The Nick Adams Stories 239).
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Hemingway: Critical Essays. Ed. Jackson Benson. Durham: Duke University Press,
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Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. “‘The Killers.’” The Short Stories of Ernest
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