Waiting, Wishing, Wanting

In "Big-Hearted River: Part One" Nick travels to the town of Seney to camp and escape from the world. Sadly, Nick finds that the town has been burnt to the ground. Nick goes through the woods not as a man but as a returning veteran. The town is a metaphor that everything anbout his home, his life is burnt and abandoned.

One of the most important metaphors in the story are the black grasshoppers. Nick spends a great deal of time observing them. These grasshoppers were not black before the town had erupted in fire but now they are. Nick wonders how long they will remain black. The grasshoppers are evident to be metaphors for Nick and his fellow traumatized soldiers. The grasshoppers as well as the soldiers have been hardened from their past and from which there is no escape.

My question as well as Nick's is how long with the grasshoppers [soldiers] stay black? Will they ever be able to shed the misery of the war and see life as a beautiful thing or will they submit to the darkness and simply wait for the end?

The "Fruits" of Society

In part one of Big Two-Hearted River, the weight of the pack on Nick’s shoulders is mentioned time and time again. It is described as “much too heavy,” and causes pain and soreness in his shoulders.
As Nick tried to escape all the conventions of society to live self-sufficiently off of the land, he couldn’t help but burden himself by bringing the fruits of this convention with him (in cans). It even says (of the canned fruit), “They were better than fresh apricots,” (fresh apricots obviously not having been processed by other people). In this way, Hemingway is saying that man will not strike away completely from society because he will always prefer to bring its “comforts” with him, though they burden him and thus prevent him from experiencing true freedom.

Addendum to Comment requirements

As long as there are comments for each post, I'm going to reduce the number of comments to 1 per week. So, you will be responsible for either commenting once or posting once (depending on the week).

Let me know if you have questions. I will make the change on the Comment requirements section of this blog.

REVIEW

This is Prof. Schaub's Review Sheet. I will also hand this out in class:

Irony defined
discussion of difference between a narrator and character
Example: last line of "Indian Camp"
Irony as expression of a relation to social existence

Sarcasm by contrast is a bitter taunt, a cutting gibe

Hemingway's gal: to create "the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion." Example: "They walked up" par.

As a result, Hemingway tried to create prose full of motion, which means verbs (action) and modification of verbs (adverbial phrases, clauses). Compare first lines of "Chapter II" and 1922 cable.

Discussion of "The Doctor and His Wife"
-- reader must judge for himself/herself the nature of the father and the mother, as well as Dick Bolton and the other Native Americans
-- Thesis statements tendered by members of class:

• father's morality comes into question
• story concerns both class and race
• Bolton's reason for impugning doctor
• trying to get out paying for medical care?
• resentment at (long ago) loss of trees and land to white man?

WWI was first modern war

• machine guns, tanks
• airplanes
• mustard gas
• attacks on civilian populations

Literary Response: relation between war experience and style

• animosity toward idealism, abstractions (honor, glory, etc.)
• desire to make language fres, concrete, "true"
• emphasis upon things, actualities
• diminshment or absence of all-knowing narrator
• stories begin in the middle of things
• lack of explanation, statements of cause
• theme of senselessness, not knowing
• emphasis on the fundamental, underlying instinctual life
• versus veneer of civilization
• tone of traumatized indifference, speaker inured to horror
• sense of compromise, of complicity
• use of irony

Idealism vs Realism

In the first few selections of In Our Time, Hemingway continually brings up themes relating to idealism. This is highlighted mostly in the the stories about Nick Adams by the serenity of the woods and Nick's persistence in believing that things will get better. Juxtaposed with this are a gruesome cesarean section, the following suicide, and Nick losing the love of his life. It is clear that Nick uses denial and idealism to protect himself from these thoughts. This is shown initially when a young Nick feels confident that he won't die after watching someone else do just that and later when an older Nick tries to rationalize to himself the implications of losing Marjorie. He even goes so far as to delude himself that he could be with her again.

In the stories related to war and not Nick Adams, Hemingway presents a seemingly opposite theme, realism. Events are told exactly as they happen, with little emotional reaction or concern. Killing, famine, and hopelessness are expressed as common, every-day occurrences.

Hemingway is using parallelism to show that the way Nick tried to block out the reality of his situation is very similar to the cold, ultra-realistic tone in the war-time passages. Though idealism tends to look away from the problem and realism directly at it (in a physical sense that is) , when both are taken to the extreme neither can properly understand it. In the case of ultra -realism, it becomes quickly apparent that by sucking out the emotional impact and human element of even the most horrific event can make it seem trivial and insignificant. On the other hand, ultra-idealism overcompensates by looking only at the good sides of things and ignoring the bad. Both are the results of the human brain's self-preservation in that they both prevent negative emotions by either covering them up with good ones (idealism) or stripping out all emotion (realism).

Interpretation of Chapter Intermissions

A sharp contrast is apparent between the chapter introductions and the following short episodes of each section in Hemingway's In Our Time. When comparing the introductions to the sections in between we see there is a transition from the war time experiences of an as of yet unknown narrator to several instances of family life that seem to revolve around our main character Nick Adams. What kind of effect might you believe Hemingway is trying to have on the reader by using these introductions of detached war-time memories?

A Game or a War?

“‘There is always more to it than we know about,’ Nick said.
“‘Of course. But we’ve got pretty good dope for being so far away.’” (41)

These two significant lines are from an important dialogue between Nick and his friend Bill on page 41 of “The Three Days Blow,” in which it seems that their conversation about the World Series is a foreshadowing and a metaphor for World War I. These two particular lines are especially important since they capture the theme of ignorance about the war that pervades the book, and although Nick is temporarily “unignorant of his ignorance,” his friend soon squelches this wisdom. Additionally Hemmingway was comparing the attitude of the departing soldiers toward the war to the attitude one would hold toward a game.