The Purge: Decimation and Renewal in ‘Big Two-Hearted River’–Caleb Elkins

As I read “Big Two-Hearted River Part: 1”, I couldn’t help but recall my lesson on purging fires.  As the fire-destroyed town is physically similar to the effects of the war, I believe the fire ravaged landscape of the forest is symbolic of Nick’s mental state.  Furthermore, the town of Seney may have been demolished, but I think it represents the rebuilding that must take place after the war.  From the ashes, society will be rebuilt, just like the forest will re-grow, and Nick will recover and be a stronger man for the experience.  Having just gone through WWI, Nick is struggling to find his place in a postwar world.  As indicative of the Lost Generation, he has lost the illusion of war’s nobility.  Many lost their faith; some of the stories of In Our Time deal with the inadequacy of religion for veterans (i.e. “Soldier’s Home”).  Nick, among others, has lost much, just like the purged forest which has lost its foliage.

            But the soil is ripe for renewal.  In “Big Two-Hearted River Part: 1” Nick goes back to things he knew from before to find his footing once again.  He hikes, fishes, and camps; Nick derives satisfaction from doing every little thing the proper way.  He is planting the soil with the seeds of his distant past, and, simultaneously, the forest is regenerating with the seeds of “jack pines [that] need fires to re-seed” (Schmidt 142).  Employing ecological, mythological, and historical systems of renewal, Hemingway positions Nick to be the key to recovery for the forest, Seney, and himself. 

            Although there are no overt references to the war or Nick’s wounding, “Hemingway admitted in A Moveable Feast that the ‘story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it’” (Smith 87).  Like so much of Hemingway’s other fiction, “Big Two Hearted River” is primarily concerned with how traumatized characters find their way in the aftermath; Nick Adams begins his path to renewal by returning to Seney to fish and camp as he had done before.  As he cinches up his backpack, Nick notices that “it was too heavy.  It was much too heavy (Hemingway 210).” This burden is literal but also figurative: I believe the weight refers to Nick’s experiences in the war that he has been unable to lighten or drop.  As he shoulders both burdens and begins his way into the burned forest, Nick finds grasshoppers the color of soot, and “wonder[s] how long they would stay that way (Hemingway 212).”  This also refers to the effects of war on Nick, and his musing is a type of self-reflection:  when will he be free from the stains the war has left on him?  The overt changes of the war, symbolized by the effects of the devastating fire, also refer to civilization because “[e]ven the surface had been burned off the ground” of Seney (Hemingway 209).  This incinerating of the surface evokes possible burns suffered in a bomb blast in the war.  The town, along with Nick and the forest, is definitely wounded; however, even in a depiction as woeful as the destroyed Seney, hope is present.  The “surface” may be gone, but the insinuation is that although the superficial may have been eradicated, what lies beneath the surface remains.  Hotels, saloons, and logging depots can be rebuilt and the town, which lies in close proximity to a beautiful forest and river, seems destined to be repopulated.  If Nick recalls what was once there, then it stands to reason that other people will as well, and they will find their way back to the decimated town.  

Furthermore, Seney may have needed to be purged as much as the forest did; Frederic Svoboda chronicles the history of Seney in relation to “Big Two-Hearted River” and summarizes Seney as a town where “six great companies and a number of smaller ones would join in raping the woods” (34).  A resident of the historic Seney, Dr. Bohn said that “Seney acquired the reputation which made it possible for the pilgrim, who journeyed hither, to ask for a ticket to hell and be sure of being understood as wanting to go to Seney” (qtd. in Svoboda 36).  If ever a community surrounded by beauty and abundant resources needed a new beginning, Seney sounds like it was the one.  The hope is that the next tenants of the land may see the error of the prior residents’ ways and be a little more eco-friendly to the area.  Perhaps Nick embodies the spirit of a new “pilgrim” from the next generation who will revere the landscape and reshape Seney into what it should have been.

Dr. Bohn’s use of the word “pilgrim” unintentionally, but poignantly, foreshadows H.R. Stoneback’s classification of “Big Two-Hearted River” as a “[s]acred [l]andscape” where Nick makes a pilgrimage to (49).  This interpretation of Nick’s “journey into the deep, secret, and redemptive Michigan northwoods” lends itself quite well into viewing the story as Nick’s quest for spiritual renewal (Stoneback 58).  Stoneback notes that the landscape lacks “shrines”, but for Nick, the river and the serene, healing power it contains replaces traditional holy artifacts or icons sought after in typical pilgrimages (Stoneback 59).  At the onset of the story, the devastation of Seney and the forest is described, but the next statement is what makes all of that tolerable: “The river was there” (Hemingway 209).  Nick spends the majority of Part I hiking in an attempt to reach the river at some unspecified perfect spot, even though “he knew he could strike the river by turning off to his left.  It could not be more than a mile away” (Hemingway 212).  It may be coincidental that the shortcut to the river was on Nick’s left, but it seems more likely that the shortcut was not the right way to reach the holy river; instead, Nick is fine with “walking across the uneven, shadeless pine plain” even though “[h]e was tired and very hot”  (Hemingway 212).  The difficulty of Nick’s hike relates to the “narrow is the way” mentality of Christian pilgrims; the sore feet and aching back associated with backpacking trips is a small sacrifice when compared to the salvation Nick is seeking in his determination to perform even the most trivial action correctly.

Nick’s determination to do every little thing in the proper way is incredibly ritualistic; in fact, his “[e]very action is charged with precision, as he makes order out of chaos” (Stoneback 59).  A prime example of Nick’s methodical procedures is how he sets up his tent:

With the ax he split off a bright slab of pine from one of the stumps and split it into pegs for the tent.  He wanted them long and solid to hold in the ground.  With the tent unpacked and spread on the ground, the pack, leaning against a jackpine, looked much smaller.  Nick tied the rope that served the tent for a ridge-pole to the trunk of one of the pine trees and pulled the tent up off the ground with the other end of the rope and tied it to the other pine.  The tent hung on the rope like a canvas blanket on clothesline.  Nick poked a pole he had cut up under the back peak of the canvas and then made it a tent by pegging out the sides.  He pegged the sides out taut and drove the pegs deep, hitting them down into the ground with the flat of the ax until the rope loops were buried and the canvas was drum tight.  (Hemingway 214-215).

Besides being detailed to the point of a how-to guide for camping, this ritualistic process of making camp serves many higher purposes, a couple of which that have been largely ignored.  By anchoring his physical and spiritual shelter with the pegs of the jack pines, Nick is literally putting down his own roots in the fertile riverbank; these roots are “solid” and will “hold” fast in the face of storm or wind.  Considering how jack pines are “the first pioneer species to colonize burned land after a fire in the natural process of forest succession” (Schmidt 142), Nick is figuratively reseeding the Earth with the trees that will restore the land.  Furthermore, Schmidt points out that “[a]s jack pine rises out of the burned plain, so Nick will rise out of his emotional pain.  Nick’s tent set up between two jack pines will shelter him during his period of recovery” (Schmidt 143).  By making “the canvas…drum tight” and setting a deep foundation, Nick creates an impenetrable home in this natural setting that will protect him from any outside forces, elemental or emotional. 

Prior to creating his shelter, Nick cut out the roots, removed the “sweet fern”, and “smoothed the up-rooted earth” in order to prepare a spot for his bed (Hemingway 214); this preparation is symbolic of Nick removing any memories or guilt that might interfere with his respite in this holy place.  In a similar fashion, Nick notices how “much smaller” his pack seemed after he had setup his tent; Nick is literally easing both his physical and emotional burden one object at a time.  After breaking camp, Nick starts dinner, removes canned food from his pack, and remarks aloud to himself how shouldering the extra load justifies his being able to eat well on the camp.  This suggests how Nick has shed some of the guilt or pain from the war, but there are still some memories and burdens that Nick cannot or chooses not to relinquish; Nick’s past may encumber him, but throughout the story, Nick is constantly removing items of his physical and metaphoric backpack.  The reader can only hope than Nick will keep the items he needs and be able to toss aside the extravagances that weigh him down and make his journey more difficult than it should be.

This motif of removing detrimental objects and memories is further developed by the depiction of Nick cleaning the two male trout.  This cleansing of sorts is meticulously detailed; in fact, it almost seems surgical: the entrails “came out in one piece” with “the insides clean” (Hemingway 231).  According to Margot Sempreora, Nick is not only gutting the fish, but himself as well; “he is emptying himself of everything that identifies him as a man and a writer” (34).  Nick’s pilgrimage is serving the same purpose as the fire did for the forest; he is eliminating the clutter that keeps him from being able to grow.  After all, the gutted trout still “looked like live fish”, and “[t]heir color was not gone yet” (Hemingway 231); for Nick, this signifies that the emptying is necessary for him to replenish himself and find new ways to live.

One of the most important changes Nick seems determined to make in order to find a new way of life is avoiding futility if possible.  The word futility is irrevocably connoted with war, especially the World Wars; subsequently, as Nick attempts to distance himself from the harmful memories of WWI, he understands that he needs to focus on making his exertions count and avoiding acts of futility.  This need for avoidance is illustrated clearly in Nick’s reluctance to fish areas where he doesn’t think he can land the trout, even though the real trophies are likely to reside in those same spaces.  When Nick spies a “beech tree” with the “branches” hanging “down into the water”, he “did not care about fishing that hole” because “[h]e was sure he would get hooked in the branches”; all the while, Nick knows that large trout are always in areas like that one, but he knows landing a fish there will be next to impossible (Hemingway 229).  Similarly, Nick wants to avoid fishing the swamp for now because “hook[ing] big trout in places impossible to land them” is the epitome of futility.   Nick deems fishing in the swamp “a tragic adventure”; the statement could all too easily be applied to the war (Hemingway 231).

However, Nick may desperately want to avoid futility and further “tragic adventure[s]”, but Nick’s need to struggle and fight is far from gone.  In the instance by the beech tree, Nick knows the likelihood of getting tangled is high, but the water “looked deep” and Nick cannot let the opportunity for a great catch escape him (Hemingway 229).  Nick fishes the hole and looses the trout in the brush as he feared, but Nick is able to move on downstream without it affecting him as the earlier lost trophy had.  This seemingly newfound capacity to transcend futility, and drop undeserved guilt, seems to fall in with the skills Nick must acquire on his journey to a fulfilling post-war life.  Furthermore, “Big Two-Hearted River: Part II” ends with Nick’s resolution that “[t]here were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp” (Hemingway 232); this decision to confront the swamp on another day shows how Nick refuses to be paralyzed by the chance of failure and his need to fight on his own terms in solitude.

Aside from the more obvious observations that Nick is seeking out the river and fishing by himself, Nick’s reflection on fishing over-crowded trout streams suggests Nick’s need for self-reliance and solitude in the face of adversity.  Nick’s preference for fishing, and fighting, alone, or at least with a group of one’s choosing is shown quite clearly:

Years before when he had fished crowded streams, with fly fishermen

ahead of him, Nick had again and again come on dead trout, furry with

white fungus, drifted against a rock, or floating belly up in some pool.  Nick

did not like to fish with other men on the river.  Unless they were of your

 party, they spoiled it. (Hemingway 225)

The strangers in the stream fishing together could allude to how soldiers are thrown together in the war to fight for causes they may or may not believe in.  The result of each situation is the same: lots of needless casualties.  Disease and sickness have historically rivaled combat for war-related deaths; likewise the trout are dying of an epidemic due to carelessness.  Nick as an individual knew to wet his hands before handling the precious trout; as a group, the estranged fishermen were careless and indifferent to the trout who dwelt in the stream.  Taking Nick’s meticulous and ritualistic actions throughout the story into account, it would seem carelessness would be a grave sin to him, if not the most despicable one.  Nick is physically, and figuratively, distancing himself from this thoughtless horde that possessed no value for life.  He is determined to stand alone against the current of the stream, and it is an absolute necessity for him in a post war world without a chain of command.  Nick is bound to determine his own victories and defeats.

            Conversely, Thomas Strychacz has argued that for Hemingway “manhood corresponds with being seen as a man” and “[w]hatever therapeutic actions Nick generates from his experience on the river can only be partial gestures toward a manhood whose completion depends on the legitimating function of an audience” (255).  This argument, although well conceived, seems a bit flawed.  Hemingway’s extensive use of sports, specifically fishing and bullfighting, exemplifies individuals struggling alone, whether against themselves, nature, or another entity; it is precisely the absence of a team that purifies the struggle.  While the audience at a bullfight may voyeuristically participate, the bullfighter is alone in the end with his adversary; the crowd may celebrate his victory, but it does nothing to aid the man in the center of the ring.  The fisherman has no audience, but he doesn’t need one.  His successes and failures belong to him alone.  Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea fights the marlin for several days by himself in a small boat; how can any rational person doubt the manhood of this “elemental Man and quest hero” because there is no audience to cheer for him (Rovit and Brenner 73)?  Nick’s individualistic struggle in the river is strengthened and authenticated by the absence of cheers; this total lack of bravado, or need to show out, is what makes the experience so edifying for Nick.  He has surpassed any adolescent fantasy of heroism and is learning that any meaningful victory happens within the individual, and, in this particular case, with that person’s communion with nature.

            Nick’s need for individual battle stems partly from his need for control, something he lacked during the war.  WWI marked the start of trench warfare; with shells falling left and right, orders that came from someone else, and attacks coming from unseen aggressors, Nick was unable to face the things that threatened him.  Another reason for his attention to detail and methodical procedures is that he is determined to control as much as he can now that he has left the war.  In the stream it’s just Nick and the trout; he can face the swamp in his own way and in his own time.  With his reacquisition of control, Nick is again relearning the concepts that will aid him in readjusting to postwar life.

            Nick’s approach to postwar life in the physical realm is fairly visible throughout the story by his actions and the decisions he makes; however, the spiritual and ancestral aspects of his renewal are a little further down the iceberg, and they depend on the allusion to the Fisher King.  In the beginning of “Big Two-Hearted River: Part I”, Nick notices a “kingfisher” fishing the stream (Hemingway 21).  Susan Schmidt points out that the inverse of “kingfisher” is in fact Fisher King (para. 7).  She goes on to explain “that the Fisher King’s health is tied to the fertility of the land.  As the Fisher King ages, becomes ill, or is wounded.  [H]is sterility causes the land to waste.  His recovery brings back the productivity of the land” (Schimdt 144).   Aside from Schmidt, many scholars, such as H.R. Stonebach and William Stein, have linked Nick to the Fisher King and briefly noted some thematic implications of the Fisher King allusion (Stonebach 59; Smith 94).  Their recognition, however, does not extend past Nick as the Fisher King and the myth merits much more development than this association in passing.

Contrary to much of the previous criticism, Nick is much more than the Fisher King himself; he is also assumes the roles of the “Quester”, the “Healer”, the young “successor” and the entire populace (Weston 64, 112).  Nick’s subsuming all of these roles is necessary because in other Fisher King legends the king is surrounded by knights and other characters that carry the burden of restoring the Fisher King; in “Big Two-Hearted River”, Nick is the only person left in the devastated land, so all the tasks fall on his shoulders in the form of the pack that “was too heavy” (Hemingway 210).  Nick’s quest is an arduous one, as is the hike to the river.

If Nick is playing the role of the Quester, the quest itself must be identified.  The quests vary from legend to legend but the defined “task of the hero is that of restoration” (Weston 21).  Often times the quests that will restore the Fisher King, and subsequently, the land is one of retrieval of a sacred artifact, such as the “Grail” (Weston 64).  Jessie Weston provides two descriptions of said Grail:  one as a “Food-providing talisman” and “another with the Grail as a vehicle of spiritual sustenance” (64).  Within the framework of “Big Two-Hearted River”, Nick’s reason for his journey, or quest, is to fish in the river; if the trout he catches are viewed as a Grail of sorts, they fit both criteria: they provide Nick with actual physical nourishment, and according to Weston: “we can affirm with certainty that the Fish is a Life symbol of immemorial antiquity, and the title of Fisher has, from the earliest ages been associated with Deities who were held to be specially connected with the origin and preservation of Life” (Weston 119).  Weston goes on to call the “Fish” a “Divine Life symbol” (121).  Furthermore, it is of particular interest that Nick catches two fish; in the Book of Mathew, Jesus feeds a multitude of 5,000 “men”, plus “women and children”, with “two fish” and “five loaves” after he blesses them (Matt. 14:21).  Although Nick prepares the fish, he never eats them in the story; perhaps the trout are destined to feed the departed populace of Seney, or they may be the answer to famine caused by the Fisher’s King’s affliction.  In any case, Nick’s catch and plan to keep fishing is directly linked to the restoration of the land, to Nick’s own renewal, and to his healing as the representative Fisher King.

The connections to Nick as a wounded Fisher King are diverse and integral to Nick’s being restored to a fully-functional individual in postwar society.  At least one individuation of the Fisher King suffered because of a wrongful death; in this myth, the king’s brother was murdered and the King’s wound was self-inflicted as a result of said murder (Weston 110).  In order for the King to be restored to health, the king’s brother must be avenged and the murderer must die (Weston 110).  Now in every war there are countless treacherous acts that result in untimely death; it stands to reason that Nick could ostensibly be suffering from one of his brother’s in arms dying in combat, but there is really no way to pin one kill on one person in a war.  It’s also counterintuitive to think that Nick’s sojourn to the river, away from society and its horrific wars, was motivated by some need for vengeance.  Nick must relinquish the anguish his recent past has wrought on him, not go off on some ill-fated quest for revenge.

Another affliction, one that boasts a stronger association to Nick, which could lead to the demise of the Fisher King is “diminishing vigour” resulting in an “inability to fulfill the desires of his wives”; this particular condition would lead to the King being condemned to death (Weston 56).  Similarly, Nick dismisses Marjorie in “The End of Something” after telling her that sex was no longer enjoyable.  His other reason for ending their relationship was shown when he tells her, “I feel as though everything was gone to hell inside off me.  I don’t know, Marge.  I don’t know what to say” (Hemingway 110).  This ambiguous psychic wounding seems to be at least part of the impetus for Nick’s pilgrimage to the river; he is hoping to heal the unnamed broken things that trouble him and find his way back to healthy relationships.  Nick must attain a level of completion with himself before he can become fully integrated into society once again.  His struggle for autonomy leads him away from his immediate history and towards his ancestral past, and the roots he planted as a younger, more innocent boy.

The connection to distant pasts is what grants Nick the chance for salvation and renewal.  As Nick sees the river for the first time in the story, he spots a trout moving, his “heart tightened”, and “[h]e felt all the old feeling” (Hemingway 210).  This “old feeling” refers to earlier trips of fishing and camping before the war, and it connects Nick to a time of “immemorial antiquity”-the time of legend, the time of Fisher Kings past (Weston 119).  Frederic Svoboda reinforces this notion without naming the Fisher king:  “These old feelings in the story may not be only the feelings Nick felt once before on a previous trip , but feelings of age, even antiquity, or of things somehow immortal” (Hemingway 39-40).   It is only through Nick’s untarnished memories and his role of the Fisher King that Nick can be redeemed, and both are connected to the trout swimming freely in the river.

The true hope for Nick is that he is not merely a complete recreation of the Fisher King, but he is also the youthful “successor” (Weston 112).  The Fisher King is never a “youthful character”; he is always either wounded or suffering from extreme old age, and, in at least one legend, his restoration precipitates his death three days later (Weston 112).   In a departure from the Fisher King, Nick’s simultaneous embodiment of “Healer”, or “youthful successor”, allows him to restore the old King, the land, and society by his catching the trout, symbolically recovering the Grail; in fact, the old Nick may very well have perished after catching the fish, and a new Nick is reborn sans the wounds and guilt that have plagued him for so long (Weston 112).  The excised, original ending to “Big Two-Hearted River: Part II” supports this assertion of rebirth; as Nick swims in the river meditating on writing, his emergence from the water could be seen as a baptism out of the River of Life (Flora 63).  He is no longer the old, tormented sinner, he is a new man, restored to a former innocence, and ready to rejoin a society and land that are both well on their own way to recovery.

Hemingway’s employment of the Fisher King mythology to illustrate the theme of renewal is a little mysterious.  Although Hemingway harbored an “obvious resentment” of T.S. Eliot, he studied his poetry and the basis for “The Wasteland”- From Ritual to Romance (Lynn 246).  Lynn believed that Hemingway’s artistic respect for Eliot led him to Weston’s depiction of the Fisher King and used that for the underlying basis of “Big Two-Hearted River”.  Aside from the depth of this legend, Hemingway had to be drawn to a mythological figure of renewal that possessed a “devotion to the pastime of fishing, like Hemingway himself did (Weston 117).  One of the quintessential Hemingway fishing quotes from The Sun Also Rises expresses Hemingway’s spiritual view of fly fishing:  while visiting a pristine cathedral in Spain, Harris comments on the church’s beauty, and Bill Gordon replies, “It isn’t the same as fly fishing though, is it?” (The Sun Also Rises 128).  The methods and ritual motions of fly fishing were, at the least, equal to the communion received at the altar; furthermore, the altar in the cathedral was man-made, whereas the river was an edifice of nature, or God.

That same summer I learned about purging fires in Yellowstone National Park, I also attempted to learn the intricacies of fly fishing.  It was foolhardy to think that I could comprehend fly fishing fully in a mere three months, but I did learn what it was like to wade out into rivers so clear and pure that every pebble underneath could be seen after hiking over some of the most beautiful landscapes known to man.  I learned the feel of a three count rhythm as I tried my best to mimic the landing pattern of the local grasshoppers.  Seeing the heavy fluorescent green line undulate in the wind, I witnessed my hopper fall behind a stone in the stream I was sure sheltered a trophy cutthroat trout from the strong current.  After a quick rise and a strong pull, I felt that trout alive in the fast moving river, and in that moment, I knew too that I was truly alive.

While a spin fisherman prays for a good haul, a fly fisherman’s prayer is that he will be fortunate enough to return to the river again.  A lot of the old fly fishermen I talked to saw their pastime as more than a hobby; it was more like a religion.  Fly fishing for me was a form of communion with nature, and whenever I left the stream, wet, cold, and exhausted from fighting the current, I couldn’t help feeling reborn.  Any catch was a bonus; I had already captured what I was seeking:  a glimpse into the sacred.  Years afterward, and occasionally now, when I have trouble falling asleep, when I need a light for the night, I picture myself wading out into a river and watching the fly-line slice through the mountain air; it may be the only prayer I still know, one that Nick knows, and one that Hemingway put down in prose.

Works Cited

Flora, Joseph M.  “Saving Nick Adams for Another Day”.  South Atlantic Review 58.2 (1993): 61-84.

Hemingway, Ernest.  The Short Stories.  New York:  Simon & Schuster Inc., 1995.

—.  The Sun Also Rises.  New York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954

Lynn, Kenneth Schuyler.  Hemingway.  New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1987.

Rovit, Earl H., and Gerry Brenner.  Ernest Hemingway Revised Edition.  New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1995.

Schmidt, Susan.  “Ecological Renewal Images in “Big Two-Hearted River”: Jack Pines Fisher King”.  Hemingway Review 9.2 (1990):  142-146.

Sempreora, Margot.  “Nick at Night: Nocturnal Metafictions in Three Hemingway Short Stories”. Hemingway Review 22:1 (2002):  21-36.

Strychaz, Thomas.  “Dramatizations of Manhood in Hemingway’s In Our Time

and The Sun Also Rises”.  American Literature 61.2 (1989):  245-260.

Smith, Paul.  A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest.  Boston:  G.K. Hall & Co., 1989.

Stoneback, H.R.  “Pilgrimage Variations:  Hemingway’s Sacred Landscapes”.  Religion and Literature 35.2-3 (2003): 49-65.

Svoboda, Frederic J. “Landscapes Real and Imagined: ‘Big Two-Hearted River’”.  Hemingway Review 16.1 (1996): 33-43.

 Weston, Jessie Laidlay.  From Ritual to Romance.  New York:  Peter Smith, 1941.