Big Two-Hearted River
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.
Hemingway was influenced by the visual innovations of Paul 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.
[2][3] 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.
[5] 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.
[6] 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".
[9][10] 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.
[11] 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.
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.
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.
"[21] 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.
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.
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.
"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.
[28] Although Hemingway's best fiction such as "Big Two-Hearted River" perhaps originated from the "dark thoughts" about the wounding,[29] 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.
"[32] 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.
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.
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.
[44] 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 story is filled with seemingly trivial detail: Nick gathers grasshoppers, brews coffee, catches and loses a large trout.
"[50] Hemingway wanted the structure of "Big Two-Hearted River" to resemble a Cézanne—with a detailed foreground set against a vaguely described background.
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.
[38] 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.
[56] 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.
[59] In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water in the half light, the fishing would be tragic ... Nick did not want it.
The campsite symbolizes safety, set deep in a pine grove and described in soothing greens; beyond three dead trees in the background looms the swamp where he will not venture.
The work was well received by critics; Edmund Wilson described the writing as "of the first distinction",[61] and in the 1940s he again wrote of "Big Two-Hearted River", "along with the mottled trout ... the boy from the American Middle West fishes up a nice little masterpiece.
[15] The piece has become one of Hemingway's most anthologized stories,[26] and one of a handful subject to serious literary criticism since its publication, and belongs in the canon of 20th-century American literature.
Beegel writes that it is considered "among the best" American short stories, along with Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat", Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher".
