Big Two Hearted River Modernism Essay

In the short allegory, ‘The Swimmer’ (1968), John Cheever explores the grandeur of the title character, Ned Merrill, a posh middle-aged man on the brink of alcoholism who lives in a world devoid of spiritual meaning and filled with materialism. Throughout the story, Ned’s swimming escapade or his seeming journey of self, pool by pool, reveals the facade of his idealized ‘reality’ and as a result, into an epoch of incredulity whereby he begins to realize that with every stroke comes disillusionment. This paradigm shift, due to Neddy’s spontaneous and irrational idea of swimming home, leads to Ned’s journey towards the truth. The truth that he had tried to avoid/deny is marked by the kindness of his friends, the weather, condition of his body

The river and fishing made such a big impact on the Maclean family that it is the root of this book. The Macleans compared the river to life, went fishing to answer questions, and created a river that has a past full of memories. The river and fishing become metaphors for life by having a life of its own.

Released in 1971 and produced by Reprise records, river is an intensely emotional contemporary folk song about heartbreak. Written solely by Joni Mitchell for her album ‘Blue’ the song is reminiscent of Christmas time although lyrically it has little relationship to Christmas. (Hopper, 2012)

Readers tend to look closely at the chapter structure and interpret them as individual pieces without stepping back to see them as a whole; yet, Hemingway notes that there is, in fact, a sense of unity between the chapters and vignettes. An obvious unifying thread is the presence of the Nick Adams stories. “Indian Camp” introduces the reader to a young, impressionable Nick. What follows are several interspersed stories that trace his coming of age in pieces such as “The Three Day Blow” and “The Battler.” The book concludes as the post-war Nick Adams provides an account of a fly-fishing adventure, bringing a sense closure to this central character. What complicates the book are the vignettes that are interspersed within the story sequence. This structure works to juxtapose thoughts and ideas, perhaps even disorient the reader, thus challenging the reader to find new interpretative strategies, much like a perspective one might need to look at modern art. Hemingway carefully chose this structure (just as he so mindfully chose his prose) as a way of framing Modernism through the written

The river represents the period between life and death. Another part of this symbol is the air representing life and under the rocks and waterfall representing death. Just as the transition from life to death is in motion, so is the rushing of the water. Both have a beginning and an ending point, but the part in the middle is constantly moving, swirling and churning. As the girl loses hope for survival and the waterfall is approaching, the narrator states, “[S]he becomes part of the river” (45). The girl now crosses over the borderline of life and death, and she is about to be swallowed up by the falls of death and can never return to life. However, when the diver goes into the river to save her, he comes out saying that “he’d never enter that river again” (47). He encounters the spiritual eccentricity of the edge of death when he looks into lifeless girl’s animated eyes, and he can not fathom that experience. Another symbol that is introduced twice is the gurgle of the aquarium, which symbolizes the attempt to understand nature’s cycle of life. As she floats downstream, the girl remembers “her sixth-grade science class, the gurgle of the aquarium at the back of the room”(45). During this moment, all of her thoughts are puzzled, and she cannot understand the death awaiting her. Later on, after sleepless nights, the diver is in the empty school where “the only sound the gurgle of the aquarium” (48). This moment is the point at which he decides

Hemingway, to illustrate the theme of sovereignty, uses the character of Nick Adams. Nick is a character who has been injured in the war and, though his wound has healed over, Nick has yet to recover mentally from the attack. Hemingway’s portrayal of Nick is of a man who is trying to regain his identity. Hemingway depicts this through stream of consciousness and symbolism. The stream of

Antwone "Fish" Fisher is a complex individual who has been through a great deal of psychological and sociological conflicts in his short life. His mother was arrested and then abandons him, he was abused physically and emotional, and then lived on the streets. In short, nearly everything bad that can possible happen to a person has happened to young Antwone Fisher before he has reached adulthood. In his autobiographical book Finding Fish (2001), Fisher explains how the torment that he experienced in his youth shaped the man that he would become in adulthood. Although this story tells about one young man's difficulties in life and how he had to overcome obstacles in order to be a functional and positive member of society, it is really a story about the larger human condition and how every person becomes affected by their experiences.

Nick is a World War I veteran who, as many veterans, suffers from emotional trauma that his experiences from the war left him with. Multiple scenes throughout the story, Big Two Hearted River, relates to Nick, the main character’s, journey toward recovery. Nick describes his surroundings in way that parallels to his own experiences and current voyage in respect to his revival.. He takes a calming adventure saturated with calming natural paths over hills, through woodland, and along a river to find peace with himself and to return to his prewar state of mind.

The world of Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” exists through the mostly unemotional eyes of the character Nick. Stemming from his reactions and the suppression of some of his feelings, the reader gets a sense of how Nick is living in a temporary escape from society and his troubles in life. Despite the disaster that befell the town of Seney, this tale remains one of an optimistic ideal because of the various themes of survival and the continuation of life. Although Seney itself is a wasteland, the pine plain and the campsite could easily be seen as an Eden, lush with life and ripe with the survival of nature.

In the beginning, Nick is describing the morning before venturing out into the Gulf of Mexico with his two friends, NFL players Marquis Cooper and Corey Smith, and his best friend, Will Bleakley. When decided it was time to head back into shore after catching plenty of fish, the anchor had gotten stuck to something and it wouldn’t budge, even when the 265 pound defensive end tried to pull it back up to the boat. Will came up with an idea to “tie the anchor line to the back of the boat, gun the motor, and try to yank the anchor out of the way” (Schuyler 35) to get unstuck from whatever it was snagged onto. On the first attempt, their day took a turn for the worse when the bow raised into the air, like when the Titanic first starting to sink, and water flooded the ten man fishing boat causing it to flip over. Unfortunately Nick was the only one that managed to power through the deadly

Hemingway was explaining that Nick was using this to help himself cope with things in life as an example of what Nick’s wants in life or self-realization. Hemingway writes later in the story when Nick sees the big trout in the river and decides not to go after it. Perhaps Nick sees it as the swamp is the misery in his life and the trout is the feeling way down deep that he does not want to obtain until he is ready. It seems that memories are the only hindrance that would keep him from getting closer to being fulfilled.

     In Hemingway’s collection of short stories, In Our Time, we follow a character by the name of Nick Adams. We are introduced to Nick in “Indian Camp” as a young boy, and follow him to adulthood in both Parts I and II of “Big Two-Hearted River”. Through this we see Nick develop and learn about some major facts of life. Nick is a character who changes through the effects of war on many different levels. Although Hemingway hardly mentions the war, he uses the stories to express different effects and emotions caused by the war.

The focus of this essay will be to analyze Nick's transition as he moves from mental isolation, to physical isolation, to maturation and self-discovery.

Next, the speaker talks about the fish’s eyes, larger, shallower, and yellower than hers. The different pieces of fishing line caught in his jaw shows how many times he either escaped or was let go by the other fishers. Then the description of the rented boat, the parts of the boat that all turned into a rainbow.

The Great War, as it is famously known, caused a major cultural shift. It had the consequences of breaking the social norms that existed at that time and was replaced with newer ways of interaction with the world. The war prompted the society to be more experimental and convinced them to embrace the unfamiliarity of individualism. The people saw war as a constant and therefore were actively looking for means to escape this reality. As the lost generation focused their literature on the inner workings of their consciousness, so did the society, but wholesomely. Due to this fact, the Modernist writers cultivated the core and fundamental virtues of that era that is how the inner consciousness functions and how it affects the self. The Big Two-Hearted River by Hemmingway is a perfect example of this Modernism shift since it describes the life of a soldier coming back from war, in the quest of serenity after the mental torment suffered during the