Nick's Self-Discovery in Hemingway's In Our Time

Nick's Self-Discovery in Hemingway's In Our Time

The focus of this essay will be to analyze Nick's transition as he moves from mental isolation, to physical isolation, to maturation and self-discovery.

If Nick's life were to be chronologically ordered and analyzed, the stories Indian Camp and The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife would definitely come first. It is these two stories that give us the first insight to what kind of character that Nick really is as a child. Because Nick is only mentioned briefly in the latter story, I think that Indian Camp is more significant in analyzing the portrayal of his character. I suppose the one passage that truly gives insight about the innocence (and ignorance) of Nick at the time was "in the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die" (19). I believe that the passage was essentially a reaction to the pregnant woman's husband's suicide. Because that was the topic that arose during the story, I believe that Nick interpreted the situation that "death" was equal to "suicide" and, in believing that he would never commit suicide, ultimately believes that he will, thus, never die. Because of the way that his father explained death, Nick's interpretation of the situation would lead him to believe that he would never die. Thus, this story essentially shows Nick's youthful innocence.

The next two stories, The End of Something and The Three-Day Blow, become very significant in analyzing Nick's character is that they essentially show the maturation of thought and philosophy that has taken place since Indian Cam...

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...ficance is that they accurately portray the desensitization to life that is experienced by soldiers.

The last three stories to deal with Nick's character, Cross Country Snow and Big Two-Hearted River (I and II), essentially portray the aftermath of the war and the toll that it had taken on Nick by changing the way that he both lived and thought. The former depicted Nick's reluctance to leave his newfound life of adventure that he had begun to experience during the war. Big Two-Hearted River essentially is the story about the way that Nick tries to recapture this freedom of lifestyle and exploration. Their significance is that they represent the final path that Nick has taken in his life. He went from mental isolation, to physical isolation, but, in the process, seemed to have found himself.