Nick Adams Stories

In Hemingway's Nick Adams Stories, Nick is a young man that goes off to war. There are quite a few different stories about him and how he grows up. Now I Lay Me, A Way You'll Never Be, and In Another Country focus on his days as a soldier.

In Now I Lay Me, the Hemingway doesn't say that the character in the story is Nick Adams, and it seems like it is actually Frederic Henry's character from A Farewell to Arms. It is about a young man looking back on memories from home with a hint of loneliness. It focus' on a conversation that two soldiers are having at night while one is having insomnia. They speak of their homes and lives away from the war.

A Way You'll Never Be is a story about Nick as a young soldier trying to get ahold of his fear of dying. He sees death all around him and is terrified. Other soldiers see that he is unstable and try to calm him. Nick talks incessantly when the fear hits him. He can't sleep because he has visions of how he was injured.

In Another Country is a story about a man recovering from an injury. He goes to therapy every afternoon with a few other wounded men. The main focus was on a man they called the major. At one point his wife dies and the major goes into a tantrum on how a man must never marry. The loss of his wife leaves him lost and angry at the world, and says, " I cannot resign himself".

Hemingway himself lived through these stories. He was wounded and terrified of dying like in A Way You'll Never Be, then has to go into therapy for his leg injuries like in In Another Country and has to deal with the woman he loves leaving him, and in Now I Lay Me, he is going through the traumatic after shock of what he has seen at war and can no longer sleep because of the awful memories (7)

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