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In his Nick Adams stories, Ernest Hemingway traces the life of a single man
as he moves from boyhood to adolescence to adulthood to fatherhood. From the
beginning of Nick Adam s life, it is clear that he does not fit into the role of the
traditional hero. In addition, Nick has difficulty achieving proper masculinity in terms
of how it was viewed at the time the stories take place. Instead, the young Nick
continually shows himself to be fearful, immature, and timid. These characteristics
would have labeled him as susceptible and predisposed to shell shock, a mark of
unmanliness, during the early twentieth century.
This thesis examines how Nick displays himself as predisposed to shell shock
before going to World War I and the tension surrounding why a person becomes shell
shocked. The opposing views regarding shell shock at the time Hemingway wrote the
Nick Adams stories is evident in the writing itself as the author struggles to decide if
Nick is innately flawed or the victim of his environment that does not allow
men/heroes to develop. As this thesis concludes, the answer appears to be that Nick is
doomed both by a natural weakness of character and a lack of proper male role
models who themselves have been "unmanned" by the horrors of modern times. |
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