«Big Two-Hearted River» is a two-part short story written by American author Ernest Hemingway, published in the 1925 Boni and Liveright edition of In Our Time, the first American volume of Hemingway’s short stories. It features a single protagonist, Hemingway’s recurrent autobiographical character Nick Adams, whose speaking voice is heard just three times. The story explores the destructive qualities of war which is countered by the healing and regenerative powers of nature. When it was published, critics praised Hemingway’s sparse writing style and it became an important work in his canon.

The story is one of Hemingway’s earliest pieces to employ his Iceberg Theory of writing; a modernist approach to prose in which the underlying meaning is hinted at, rather than explicitly stated. «Big Two-Hearted River» is almost exclusively descriptive and intentionally devoid of plot.

Hemingway was influenced by the visual innovations of Cézanne’s paintings and adapted the painter’s idea of presenting background minutiae in lower focus than the main image. In this story, the small details of a fishing trip are explored in great depth, while the landscape setting, and most obviously the swamp, are given cursory attention.

Background and publication

In 1922, Hemingway moved with his wife Hadley to Paris, where he worked as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. He became friends with and was influenced by modernist writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. The year 1923 saw his first published work, a slim volume titled Three Stories and Ten Poems, followed the next year by another collection of short vignettes, in our time (without capitals).

Hoping to have in our time published in New York, in 1924 he began writing stories to add to the volume with «Big Two-Hearted River» planned as the final piece. He started writing the story in May of that year but did not finish until September as he spent the summer helping Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford launch the journal the transatlantic review.

«Big Two-Hearted River» has strong autobiographical elements. During World War I, Hemingway signed on as a member of the Red Cross at age 19, and was sent to the Italian Front at Fossalta as an ambulance driver. On his first day there, he helped to retrieve the remains of female workers killed in a munitions factory explosion, about which he later wrote in Death in the Afternoon: «I remember that after we searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments». A few days later, on July 8, 1918, he was severely wounded when a mortar bomb exploded between his legs.

He was sent to a hospital in Milan where he recuperated for six months; after his return home, he went on a week-long fishing and camping trip in September 1919 with two high school friends to the backcountry near Seney in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—a trip that became the inspiration for «Big Two-Hearted River». The manuscript shows the use of plural pronouns, suggesting that in an early version more characters were included, but by publication any mention of his friends or the townspeople had been removed—leaving Nick alone in the woods.

Hemingway gave the draft to Stein to read in October 1925; she advised cutting the 11-page section of stream-of-consciousness reminiscences written from Nick’s point of view. Hemingway took her advice, reworked the ending, and wrote to his editor: «I have discovered that the last eleven pages of the last story in the book are crap». Biographer James Mellow writes that at this early stage in his career Hemingway had not developed his talent enough to fully and capably integrate self-reflections in his writing; Mellow also believes the deleted passage might have been a «tour-de-force» had it been written at a more mature period in Hemingway’s development.

In January 1925, while wintering in Schruns, Austria, waiting for a response from query letters written to friends and publishers in America, Hemingway submitted the story to be published in his friend Ernest Walsh’s newly established literary magazine This Quarter. Walsh bought it for 1,000 French francs, the highest payment Hemingway had yet received for a piece of fiction. On October 5, 1925, the expanded edition of In Our Time (with conventional capitalization in the title) was published by Boni & Liveright in New York.

The last story in the volume was the two-part «Big Two-Hearted River». The piece was later included in Hemingway’s collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories published in October 1938, and in two collections of short stories published after his death, The Nick Adams Stories (1972) and The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition (1987). The fragment Hemingway cut was published posthumously as a separate short story titled «On Writing» in 1972 in The Nick Adams Stories.

Plot

Part one

The story opens with Nick arriving by train at Seney, Michigan, to find that a fire has devastated the town, leaving «nothing but the rails and the burned-over country.» While following a road leading away from the town, he stops on a bridge where he observes trout in the river below. After, he hikes up a hill and rests at a burned stump. While smoking a cigarette, he discovers an ash-blackened grasshopper crawling on his sock, and detaches it. His first spoken words in the story are «Go on, hopper …. Fly away somewhere.»

Later in the day he relaxes in a glade of tall pines and falls asleep. When he wakes, he hikes the last mile to the edge of the river where he sees the trout feeding in the evening light «making circles all down the surface of the water as though it were starting to rain.» He pitches his tent, unpacks his supplies, cooks his dinner, fills his water bucket, heats a pot of coffee, and kills a mosquito before falling asleep.

Part two

Early the next morning, Nick fills a jar with 50 dew-heavy grasshoppers found under a log he names a «grasshopper lodging-house», eats breakfast, drinks sweetened coffee and makes a sliced onion sandwich. After checking and assembling his fly fishing rod and tying on damp leader line, he walks to the river with a net hanging from his belt, a sack over his shoulder and the jar of grasshoppers dangling around his neck. Wading in the water, he fishes the shallows; he lands a trout that «was mottled with clear, water-over-gravel color» that he releases.

Moving into a pool of deeper water, he hooks a large trout, «as broad as a salmon», which he loses. After a rest, he moves away from the pool to the more shallow center of the river and catches two trout that he stows in his sack. Sitting on a log, smoking a cigarette and eating his onion sandwich, he thinks about fishing the deep water of the swamp, but decides to wait for another day. At the log in the river, he kills, guts and cleans the two trout before returning to camp.

Themes

War

Hemingway saw World War I as the «central fact of our time». «Big Two-Hearted River» hints at both widespread physical devastation and Nick’s personal war and post-war experience, but neither of these central facts are directly mentioned. Hemingway scholar Joseph Flora makes the observation that Hemingway portrays Nick’s character coping «more meaningfully than he had ever done before, with the issues of life and death».

Biographer Phillip Young sees the story as basically concerned with a description of a young man «trying desperately to keep from going out of his mind.» Nick returns wounded, and introduces a character type Hemingway used again in his later stories and novels. The theme of an unspecified wound is introduced, a device that was to culminate in Jake Barnes’ character in The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway scholar William Adair suggests that Nick’s war experience was different, and perhaps more traumatic than Hemingway’s own, writing that Nick’s unspecified wound should not be confused or automatically identified with Hemingway’s wound.

Although Hemingway’s best fiction such as «Big Two-Hearted River» perhaps originated from the «dark thoughts» about the wounding, Jackson Benson believes that autobiographical details are employed as framing devices to make observations on life in general and not just Nick’s own experiences. He writes that Hemingway created «what if» scenarios from real situations in his early fiction, which he projected onto a fictional character—»What if I were wounded and made crazy?» the character asks himself. Benson goes on to write that «much of Hemingway’s fiction is dream-like—his early fiction, his best, has often been compared to a compulsive nightmare, as in the recurring imagery of In Our Time.»

Adair views the river setting as a fictional representation of the Piave River near Fossalta, the site of Hemingway’s mortar wound. Hemingway may have taken the idea of the swamp from the terrain in the battle of Portogrande—a battle that Hemingway wrote about in a 1922 newspaper story, saying of it: «Austrians and Italians attacked and counter-attacked waist deep in swamp water». Furthermore, Adair suggests that Hemingway’s own wounding is reflected in the scene where Nick loses a fish—the «biggest one I ever had»—with descriptive imagery such as shoes «squelchy» with water, suggestive of Hemingway’s recollection of «feeling as if his boots were filled with warm water (blood) after his wounding.»

Writing in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway remembered «Big Two-Hearted River», recalling when he «sat in a corner with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in the notebook …. When I stopped writing I did not want to leave the river where I could see the trout in the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. The story was