Nature
Hemingway’s stories typically position nature as a source of refuge and rebirth. His characters are often shown retreating to the country in search of regeneration. Nature acts as the setting for hunters’ or fishermen’s existential moment of transcendence—especially at the moment when prey is killed. In Big Two-Hearted River, Nick walks away from a ruined town, and enters the woods to hike toward the river, unharmed by the fire.
His journey is motivated by absolution; the river is described as two-hearted because it gives life in the form of food (fish) and offers redemption. In the woods, Nick stops in a grove of trees that is described as chapel-like, a description that echoes Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage in which Henry Fleming flees to a chapel-like grove of trees. In the grove Nick sleeps well for the first time since the war, and there he begins the healing process. The next morning he goes to the river, wading into the water to fish. At first the strength of the current frightens him, and for some moments he has difficulty controlling himself.
Hemingway’s descriptions of the Michigan landscape, which would have been familiar to him as in his youth he summered at the family’s Walloon Lake cottage in Northern Michigan, are presented in a vague and dreamlike manner. Ronald Berman sees Hemingway’s treatment of landscape as like a painter’s canvas on which he presents Nick’s state of mind.
The descriptions of the river’s water have been compared to American transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau’s descriptions of the pond in Walden. Biographer Meyers sees the story as a blend of American primitivism and sophistication; Nick evidences a sense of loss which is «not simply grace under pressure—but under siege». Nature is perceived as good and civilization as bad—a pervasive theme in American literature, found in such American classics as Mark Twain’s 19th-century Huckleberry Finn and in William Faulkner’s 20th-century Go Down, Moses.
According to Hemingway scholar Susan Beegel, Hemingway is fundamentally an American nature writer. She attributes it to his upbringing: his mother, Grace Hemingway, believed avidly in the early 20th-century «back to nature» movement, and his father was a physician who taught science to his son, taking him to Agassiz Movement meetings as a young boy. Hemingway’s affinity with nature is reflected most strongly in «Big Two-Hearted River», in broad strokes whereby he has Nick traveling deep into the American back-country to find solace, and in small details such as his Agassiz «object oriented» descriptions of the grasshoppers.
Style
Iceberg theory
Hemingway was inspired by Ezra Pound’s writings and applied the principles of imagism to his own work. Pound’s influence can be seen in the stripped-down, minimalist style characteristic in Hemingway’s early fiction. Betraying his admiration for the older writer, he admitted that Pound «taught me more about how to write and how not to write than any son of a bitch alive». He also learned from James Joyce, who further instilled the idea of stripped down economic prose.
Hemingway’s short stories from the 1920s adhere to Pound’s tight definition of imagism; biographer Carlos Baker writes that in his short stories Hemingway tried to learn how to «get the most from the least, to prune language, to multiply intensities, to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth». Hemingway adapted this style into a technique he called his iceberg theory: as Baker describes it, the hard facts float above water while the supporting structure, including the symbolism, operates out of sight.
The iceberg theory has been termed the «theory of omission». Hemingway believed a writer could convey an object or concept while writing about something entirely different. In «Big Two-Hearted River» he elaborates on the mundane activities Nick carries out. The story is filled with seemingly trivial detail: Nick gathers grasshoppers, brews coffee, catches and loses a large trout. In this climactic event, however, the excitement and tension becomes so strong that Nick betrays his inner thoughts and he takes a break.
While Hemingway painstakingly describes seemingly extraneous minutiae from Nick’s fishing trip, he avoids or barely hints at the driving force of the work: the emotional turmoil wrought on Nick by his return home from a catastrophic war. Hemingway has said he believes this avoidance made the heart and thrust of the story all the more acute, writing «‘Big Two-Hearted River’ is about a boy beat to the wide coming home from the war …. beat to the wide was an earlier and possibly more severe form of beat, since those who had been were unable to comment on this condition and could not suffer that it be mentioned in their presence. So the war, all mention of the war, anything about the war is omitted.» Flora believes that in «Big Two-Hearted River» the concept of the iceberg theory is more evident than in any other piece written by Hemingway.
Paul Smith believes Hemingway was still only experimenting stylistically during In Our Time. He maintains that Hemingway’s later minimalist style can be seen here, but not so much from tight editing as from Hemingway’s first approach, his desire to emulate his influences. Hemingway’s sentences «began life as scrawny little things, and then grew to their proper size through a process of accretion.» He avoided complicated syntax to reflect Nick’s wish that the fishing trip be uncomplicated.
An analysis of the text shows that about 70 percent of the sentences are simple sentences—a childlike syntax without subordination—and that repetition is often substituted for subordinate thoughts. Furthermore, the repetition creates prose with a «rhythmic, ritualistic effect» that emphasizes important points. The lengths of the paragraphs vary with short paragraphs intensifying the action. Benson writes that in «Indian Camp» and «Big Two-Hearted River» Hemingway’s prose was sharper and more abstract than in other stories, and that by employing simple sentences and diction—techniques he learned writing for newspapers—the prose is timeless with an almost mythic quality.
Cézanne
Hemingway greatly admired Cézanne and early in his career crafted his prose in a way that would resonate with that painter’s work. He said in a 1949 interview that «Cézanne is my painter after the early painters …. I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cézanne, I learned how … by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times.» Hemingway wanted the structure of «Big Two-Hearted River» to resemble a Cézanne—with a detailed foreground set against a vaguely described background. In a letter to Stein from August 1924, he wrote, «I have finished two long stories … and finished the long one I worked on before I went to Spain where I am doing the country like Cézanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit. It is about 100 pages long and nothing happens and the country is swell. I made it all up».
His description of the river and the countryside betray the influence of the Post-Impressionist style. Hemingway was heavily influenced by the modernists. He often visited the Musée du Luxembourg, where he saw three Cézanne paintings, L’Estaque, Cour d’une ferme, and Les Peupliers. A series of Cézanne watercolors were exhibited at Berheim-Jeune Gallery before he began writing the story. Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast that he had been «learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them.»
Comparing «Big Two-Hearted River» to Cézanne’s paintings, Berman observes that Hemingway established a «representation of form, space and light», and that the dense descriptive passages give «light and form …. overwhelmingly visual, intensely concerned with spatiality», while in the middle ground, «We sense the trees through vertical forms and dark colors only». Like Cézanne paintings, Hemingway’s landscapes are vague and do not represent any specific place: Seney burned in 1891, not in 1919; the hill Nick climbs does not exist; and the east branch of the Fox River, where he camps, is not a day’s hike from the town.
Kenneth Johnston believes Hemingway’s use of symbolism is a substitute for paint and brushstrokes. He views the description of the town after the fire, and the railroad tracks, as words «slashed across the landscape», with a physicality similar to a Cézanne landscape. The minutely detailed passages of the campsite and Nick’s mundane activities fill the story’s foreground, while the forest and menacing swamp, relegated to the background, are described vaguely and only in passing. The river acts as a barrier between the foreground and background, and is present as deep in places, shallow in others, with currents that are either slow or fast. Berman says Nick is shown as a figure in a painting—seen in the foreground at the campsite and at a distance from the murky background of the swamp.
Symbolism
Nick is incapable of self-reflection and unable to cope with pain. Hemingway conveys this through symbolism and a series of objective correlatives (tangible objects), which allow the reader insight to the character’s motivations. For example, on his arrival in Seney he literally falls off the train, shocked at the sight of the burned town, but on a deeper level in shock from his war experience. Leaving behind the burnt landscape, Nick climbs a hill in the heat, and surveys the town’s damage. The burning and heat symbolize his memory of war-torn Italy, but he hopes for regrowth: «It could not all be burned. He knew that». At the top of the hill, he takes a break, smokes a cigarette, and speaks for the first time. Flora suggests that speaking
