Most people are afraid of death. Some people are scared of being dead; others are terrified of the act of dying. However, the fear of death does not occur naturally; usually little kids do not even know what death is. This kind of fear can originate from early childhood, especially in brutal environments. Facing a horrifying experience may result in psychological trauma, which causes fears and nightmares. When we are little we have our family to take care of us and make fears manageable. But what if parents are not capable of doing that? What if they think that it is better for their child to go through fears alone? Ernest Hemingway in The Nick Adams Stories provides an example of the consequence of parents’ refusal to guide their child through his early and difficult experiences. Nick Adams is afraid of death as a result of his violent environment and lack of parental support.
Nick’s childhood begins in the Michigan woods where his father takes him to fish and hunt. From those early years Nick is scared of the unknown and indefinite which is an indication of death: “He was not afraid of anything definite as yet. But he was getting very afraid.” (14). Then he realizes that he would die someday too. Here the child firstly realizes what the death is and then gets scared. However, his parents do not help Nick overcome those fears earlier, which lead to Nick’s obsession with death later in his life. In “Indian Camp” where Dr. Adams takes his boy to watch a woman in labor, Nick has his first encounter with both birth and death. Watching his father perform a very rational but fierce surgery and witnessing woman suffer from pain leads to psychological trauma of Nick. Although Nick is trying “not to see what his father is doing” (19), D...
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...llow color of the house signifies Nick’s cowardice” (32). When Captain Paravicini tells Nick that he is very courageous, he answers: “No… I prefer to get stinking. I’m not ashamed of it.” “Besides associating yellow with cowardice, most scholars agree that Nick’s mind has provided ‘the yellow house in place of the sensory details of his wounding and death’” (Quick, 32).
The phobias people have can be due to different reasons, most of the time these come from something they either experienced or have somebody told them (second hand experience). In Nick's case it was both. More over, the intensity of the events happening in his life is tremendous. The outcomes can be seen in Nick's deep trauma and his psychological disability that causes significant distress and fear of death. The state Nick is in can be very harmful and can even have lethal effect on him.
Finally, Nick’s inability to involve himself emotional with anyone is also a problem. He is more of a bystander than a participant. He fears of being close to anyone, and mostly just gets along with everything. That is a problem. He needs to find someone to listen to, instead of him always being the listener. This emotional distance, which he has, is not a healthy thing for him and can cause him to end being a loner.
Little Billy was terrified because his father had said Billy was going to learn to swim by the method of sink-or-swim. His father was going to throw Billy into the deep end, and Billy was going to damn well swim. It was like an execution. Billy was numb as his father carried him from the shower room to the pool. His eyes were closed. When he opened his eyes, he was on the bottom of the pool and there was beautiful music playing everywhere. He lost consciousness, but the music went on. He dimly sensed that someone was rescuing him. Billy resented that. (43-4)
Daisy. (Eble, pg. 963) This quote foreshadows to the end of the novel when Nick is left
Among the first indicators of Nick’s unreliability as a narrator is shown through his extreme misunderstanding of his father’s advice. When Nick’s father told him that “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had” (1) he most likely meant not all people have the same opportunities in life. However, Nick perverted his father’s meaning and understood it as “a sense of the fundamental decencies us parceled out unequally at birth” (2). Nick’s interpretation of his father’s advice provides insight into his conceited, somewhat supercilious attitude, as he believes that not all people are born with the same sense of manners and morality.
Fear is an amazing emotion, in that it has both psychological as well as physiological effects on the human body. In instances of extreme fear, the mind is able to function in a way that is detached and connected to the event simultaneously. In “Feared Drowned,” Sharon Olds presents, in six brief stanzas, this type of instance. Her sparse use of language, rich with metaphors, similes and dark imagery, belies the horror experienced by the speaker. She closes the poem with a philosophical statement about life and the after-effects that these moments of horror can have on our lives and relationships.
Nick attempts to avoid his traumatic memories through intentional self-distraction while he meticulously controls his external environment. Furthermore, by carefully constructing his surroundings, he is able to offer some stability to his traumatized mind. In particular, his fastidious assembly of the camp provides him with a great sense of satisfaction, for he feels that “he was there, in the good place” and “nothing could touch him.” By performing simple tasks in a methodical and systematic manner, he demands his own full attention and therefore prevents his mind from drifting. With his complete focus directed on levelling and smoothing out his campsite, his subconscious is unable to return to h...
...eep my refuse away” (Pg. 177). This shows Nick’s sense of decency and friendship. He realizes that fast carousing life of the East Egg is a terrifying cover for moral emptiness from inside just like the valley of ashes. Before leaving to go back home he took care of all unfinished business. He ended his relationship with Jordan and walked away from Tom Buchanan who he only shared college experiences with. Nick needed to go back to a cleaner simpler time in life away from East Egg and the Great Gatsby. At last his greatest fear came true; he became all alone by himself. At the end he realized that he has been changed and won’t be able to go back to how he used to be. Even though his personality remains the same he is stronger from inside; not afraid of anything.
The maturation of Nick begins with his description of his time leading to his arrival in West Egg, “I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War” (Fitzgerald, 3). The protagonist comes into the story having not lived much of his life in the normal world that he desires to successfully conquer. He goes directly from schooling into the war, where he found heroic satisfaction. Yet, somehow, Nick is able to keep part of himself innocent and pure despite being in the horrors of war. It is not long after attending his first party at Gatsby’s that Nick confesses that “Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known’ (Fitzgerald, 59). The level of Nick’s idealism and virtuousness begins at such an innocent pl...
The mind is a very powerful tool when it is exploited to think about situations out of the ordinary. Describing in vivid detail the conditions of one after his, her, or its death associates the mind to a world that is filled with horrific elements of a dark nature.
Through Nick’s stream of unconsciousness in the following lines: "Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life,” (p. ) the reader learns how Nick is completely lost as he cannot identify himself apart from the others. Nick continues this idea as he says how he “felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others.” This line shows how Nick justifies his lifestyle as he suggests other have it too.
Ernest Hemingway uses the various events in Nick Adams life to expose the reader to the themes of youth, loss, and death throughout his novel In Our Time. Youth often plays its part in war, and since In Our Time writes very frequently about war; it is not a surprise that the theme of youth is seen in many of the stories. In “Indian Camp” the innocence of youth is shown in the last sentence of the story: “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) When this sentence and the conversation Nick and his father have before they get on the boat are combined in thought it shows that because of Nicks age at the time that he does not yet understand the concept of death.
According to Ernest Becker, “The main thesis of this book is that it explains: the idea of death, the fear of death that haunts humans like nothing else; the mainspring of human activity designed to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man” (“Becker” ix). The author of this book describes and quotes many other psychological thinkers views on the different kinds of fear and what contributes to the fear of death in man. The author explores several topics like self-worth, heroism, fear, anxiety, depression and many other issues throughout this book.
Nick is the overseer in the novel, and shook by the pretentious of the upper class 's carelessness, causing him to desire to leave the East back to where he originally began. He witnesses innocent dreamers get crushed by the harshness of the world. The fallacies of America are utilized to depict the faults in the dreams of each character. In the end, death inevitably killed their endeavor to pursue the American
I think he learn the beauty of life and its beginning. Nick also learns that death is certain I think he tries to deny the fact by saying he isn 't going to die.
Death can be very scary for the elder and young. One never really knows how they will react to the event of death. Even though inevitable, death can be shocking for some or troubling for others. A shocking and a troubling reality of death are depicted in two short stories, Used to Live Here Once by Jean Rhys and A Father’s Story by Andre Dubus. How characters in a story react to death are often different from one another.