There are, as criticism has come slowly to recognize, not one but two Hemingway heroes; or, to use Philip Young's designations, the "Nick-Adams-hero" and the "code-hero." The generic Nick Adams character, who lives through the course of Hemingway's fiction, appears first as the shocked invisible "voice" of the miniatures of in our time; he grows up through Hemingway's three volumes of short stories and at least four of his novels, sometimes changing his name to Jake Barnes, Frederick Henry, Mr. Frazer, Macomber, Harry, Robert Jordan, Richard Cantwell; and he makes his final appearances (appropriately un-named as when he first entered the fictional stage) in Hemingway's last two published stories in 1957. The code-hero also figures in Hemingway's earliest fiction. He dies of a cogida as Maera in in our time, and he is resurrected in a considerable variety of shapes, forms, and accents (usually non-American) through the bulk of Hemingway's creative output. His manifestations would include the Belmonte of The Sun Also Rises; Manuel in "The Undefeated"; the Major of "In Another Country."… (p. 55)

For convenience sake I will refer to the Nick Adams hero as the tyro and to the "code-hero" as the tutor; for it is basically an educational relationship, albeit a very one-sided one, which binds them together. The tyro, faced with the overwhelming confusion and hurt (nada) inherent in an attempt to live an active sensual life, admires the deliberate self-containment of the tutor (a much "simpler man") who is seemingly not beset with inner uncertainties. Accordingly, the tyro tries to model his behavior on the pattern he discerns. However, the tyro is not a simple man; being in fact a very near projection of Hemingway himself, he is never able to attain the state of serene unself-consciousness—what [Henry] James once called nastily "the deep intellectual repose"—that seems to come naturally to the tutor. What he can learn, however, is the appearance of that self-containment. He can laboriously train himself in the conventions of the appearance which is "the code"; and he can so severely practice those external restraints as to be provided with a pragmatic defense against the horrors that never cease to assault him.

It may be salutary to digress slightly to what we can call "The Education of Nick Adams" because there is some inevitable confusion surrounding it. In one sense the education is thoroughly abortive; Nick at the end of his multi-chequered career is as terrified and lost as he was, for example, in his encounter with the stark, machined horror of the Chicago gangsters in "The Killers." In the following quotation is the tyro, aged somewhere in his mid-fifties, trying to cope with the loss of his eyesight ("Get a Seeing-Eyed Dog"): "Because I am not doing too well at this. That I can promise you. But what else can you do? Nothing, he thought. There's nothing you can do. But maybe, as you go along, you will get good at it." The tyro, with his unfair inheritance from Hemingway of a particularly fecund and hyperactive imagination of disaster, has lost nothing of his capacities to be afraid—in spite of his long indoctrination in the craft of courage. In fact, he has rather increased his capacities, for his accumulated experience of horror has taught him many more things of which to be afraid. Measured pragmatically, however—and the defense never pretends to be more than a pragmatic one—Nick does survive for an astonishingly long time. He does, as Hemingway puts it, get pretty good at it as he goes along.

If we sketch briefly Nick's biography, we will be able to judge somewhat better the values of his education and to note also the varying ways that Hemingway employed him as shock absorber and seismographer of emotional stress. Nick is born, roughly at the turn of the twentieth century, somewhere in the Midwest. His father, a physician, is ford of hunting and shooting, and is concerned to teach Nick the proper ways of handling a rod and a gun. Dr. Adams has incredibly sharp eyesight and is a better wing-shot than Nick will ever be. He is also intimidated by his wife—a suspiciously indistinct character who is a blur of polite nagging and vague religious sentiments—and, on one occasion, Nick is shocked to see his father back down from a fight. The pattern of cowardice and intimidation, never actually explained, comes to a disgusting (to Nick) finale when his father commits suicide in the 1920's with Nick's grandfather's gun. (pp. 55-6)

As a boy, Nick's adventures are an extreme distillation of the excitements, perplexities, and terrors that are classically supposed to accompany adolescence…. His characteristic response to the situations in which he finds himself is open-eyed shock; he registers the events as though he were a slow-motion camera, but rarely if ever does he actively participate in these events. He never really gets into a fight; he does not argue; he does not retreat to protect his sensibilities. Like the camera, he has a curious masochistic quality of total acceptance and receptivity. At about this point we begin to suspect that the adventures of Nick Adams are approximately as realistic as "The Adventures of Tom Swift," although any individual episode in the serial is gratifyingly convincing. We begin to suspect that Hemingway's tyro figure is a projection into the nightmare possibilities of confusion, pain, and immolation; that his adventures are mythic fantasies, guided by the rhythms of intense fear and alienation. That, in short, Nick Adams is a sacrificial victim, bound time and time again to the slaughtering-table to be almost slaughtered in order that his creator and readers may be free of fear. (pp. 56-7)

Such is Nick Adams, surely not, as one critic explains, "[the story of a man's life which] differs in no essential way from that of almost any middleclass American male who started life at the beginning of the present century or even with the generation of 1920" [see excerpt above by Carlos Baker]. There is very little that is realistically representative in the career of Nicholas Adams, nor, I would submit, is there meant to be. In a sense—which his name suggests—he is a released devil of our innocence, an enfleshment of our conscious and unconscious fears dispatched to do battle with the frightening possibilities that an always uncertain future holds over our heads. He is the whipping-boy of our fearful awareness, the pragmatic probability extrapolated into a possible tomorrow to serve as a propitiary buffer against the evils which tomorrow may or may not bring. He suffers our accidents and defeats before they happen to us…. Hemingway plays him as the sacrificial card in his hand which will finesse the ruthless king; he is the defeated victim, but in experiencing his defeat, Hemingway (and we) can ring ourselves in invisible armor so that we will be undefeated if and when the catastrophes of our imagination do actually occur. On this level, then, the Nick Adams projection is a vital defensive weapon in Hemingway's combat with the universe. (p. 59)

[The] tyro and the tutor figures … were central to the typical Hemingway fiction…. (p. 78)

There are, I suppose, three characteristic Hemingway stories: those in which the tyro appears more or less alone; those in which the tutor dominates the space of the fiction; and those in which the tutor-tyro axis regulates the revolution of the story…. [The] tyro story is an exposition of severe emotional reaction, with the tension of the story dependent on the contrast between the accumulated momentum of the emotion demanding to be released and the resisting forces within the style and content which attempt to restrain that release. The tyro story thus tends to resemble an unexploded bomb in imminent danger of explosion. The tutor story has a greater degree of narrative distance and therefore depends less for its effect on the creation of an immediate emotional impact. It is a form of exemplary story with the developed tensions released along the channels of pathos. Its direction will move inevitably toward the genre of the fable and the parable. And the tutor-tyro story follows the structure of the educational romance or, as it has been called, the "epistemological story," that characteristically American variation on the Bildungsroman (which is too loosely termed an "initiation" or "rites of passage" story). Its direction tends to lead to a revelation of "truth," generally in the form of self-discovery or self-realization. These three forms are, of course, not that distinct and arbitary in Hemingway's work, and there is a constant infiltration of one form into the other.

The tyro stories, in their purest form, are those Nick Adams stories in which there are no other significant characters except Nick. These would include "Big Two-Hearted River: Parts I and II," "Now I Lay Me," and "A Way You'll Never Be." "Now I Lay Me" is a straight first-person narration, while the other two are presented from an impersonal third-person viewpoint so closely focused on the tyro character as to make the narrative device very similar to James's use of a "lucid reflector." In terms of Nick's biography, "Now I Lay Me" (1927) comes first; a direct recounting of his convalescence in Milan after the Fossalta wound, it deals largely with his almost Proustian inability to go to sleep and with the various ways he diverts his mind from dangerous preoccupations that might carry him over the thin edge. The last full third of the story records the banal dialogue between Nick and a wounded fellow soldier, John…. The story doesn't quite work, however, although the straight interior memory passages are excellent; for the two sections of the story never quite engage each other. The first section is narrated with an interest that diverts the reader's attention from the state of Nick's mind to his memories themselves; and the second section has perhaps too flatted a key to provide the necessary contrast. We are meant to feel, I think, that Nick is in a far other country than the more prosaic, less sensitive John; this is one of Hemingway's recurrent themes, but I do not find it successfully dramatized within the texture of the prose.

"A Way You'll Never Be" (1933), second in the Nick chronology, deals with his shell-shocked return to his outfit after his release from the hospital. His nerves are shattered and his mind has a tendency to jump around and off, as though its flywheel were disconnected. There is some experimentation with stream-of-consciousness exposition, valuable for what it tells us about Nick; but these sections are not so selectively controlled as those in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and in For Whom the Bell Tolls. In spite of the tone of the story—and there is more obvious hysteria in it than anywhere else in Hemingway's fiction—it fails to create a meaningful tension. There just simply isn't any real conflict in the plot, the structure, or the style to make this a potential bomb. The best part of the story—a part which does develop a real tension—is the description of Nick's ride over the war-pocked road to his meeting with Captain Paravicini.

"Big Two-Hearted River: Parts I and II" (1925), third in the sequence of Nick's adventures, describes approximately twenty-four hours of activity from the time Nick gets off a train in desolated Upper Michigan to hike to a suitable campsite until he calls the fishing over for the day on the following afternoon. Although the story has no plot of any significance, and nothing happens that is in any way untoward in such a fishing trip, it builds up an almost unbelievable tension and has justly been considered one of Hemingway's finest fictions. It is really a tour de force of style, since it is almost exclusively the style which persuades the reader that Nick is in a most precarious state of nervous tension which he is desperately holding under clenched control. From having read other Nick stories, the reader may be prepared to fill in the antecedent background to this innocuous fishing trip; but even without that background the dramatic situation of the story seems obvious. (pp. 78-80)

The story operates … on two levels. On the first it describes the self-administered therapy of a badly shocked young man, deliberately slowing down his emotional metabolism in order to allow scar tissue to form over the wounds of his past experience. On another level it represents the commencement of the journey into self. But this journey is highly cautious: "He did not want to rush his sensations any." He makes sure that he has a good safe place from which to operate. He fishes first in the brightly lit part of his stream of consciousness. And even there he acts with slow, controlled care; precipitate action may frighten away the quarry he seeks, or it may even frighten off the seeker. He knows that the big fish are in the almost dark places, in the frightening mist-hung swamps of his awareness; he knows also that, if he is to find himself, it is there that he ultimately must look. Meanwhile he gathers his courage together and takes the first measured steps of exploration into the undiscovered country of his mind. There will be plenty of time to fish the swamp.

"Big Two-Hearted River" can be seen, then, as a tyro story which generates its power not from what it actually says, but from what it does not say. It is the latter, the unspoken volumes which shriek from beneath the pressure of the taut prose exposition, that expresses the emotional communication to the reader. This technique, which we may call "the irony of the unsaid," is one of Hemingway's favorite tricks and one of his most powerful ways of transmitting the shock of emotion in prose. This common device of the miniatures of in our time (his earliest tyro stories) Hemingway uses to great advantage in those tyro stories which confront Nick with situations of severe violence with which he is unable to cope. Thus, in "The Killers," in "The Battler," and in "An Alpine Idyll," situations are developed of such moral outrage as to demand a comment or an indication of appropriate reaction. The situations themselves are reported impersonally and even laconically; the presentation, as in "Big Two-Hearted River," emphasizes the disparity between what has happened and what ought to be the reaction. Hemingway's artful refusal to give an overt outlet to these reactions in the events or the style of the fictions brings the crescendo of tension to a breaking point. Hemingway … holds his pressure on the line until he has exacted the maximum degree of strain; if he slackens it, the reader may get away; if he pulls it too tight, the line may break (as it does in "An Alpine Idyll") and the reader will be free. But when it is just right, as in "Big Two-Hearted River," the reader is caught and forced into response. (pp. 82-3)

[The] third typical Hemingway structure … [is] the tutor-tyro story. In such a story—"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "In Another Country" are good examples—the protagonist is placed in a learning relationship to one or more characters and events which will teach him something about the nature of life; how best to live it; and also, more important, something about himself. These then tend to be stories of growth, and many critics have somewhat inaccurately dubbed them "initiation" stories or chronicles of the "rites of passage." (p. 94)

In Hemingway's stories of this type, the protagonist is always the tyro. Sometimes, as in "In Another Country," this is difficult to see; but it is always the tyro figure who encloses and structures the story. These stories are usually narrated in the first person; but, when narrated from an impersonal viewpoint, they achieve the same effect through a variation of the Jamesian device of the "reflecting consciousness." Also, since the tyro is generally in a state of stress or imbalance, this tutor-tyro story frequently merges with the straight tyro stories or "unexploded bomb" stories. "The Killers" or "The Battler," for example, might be included in this type. The distinctive feature of the epistemological story, it seems to me, is the emphasized presence within the story of a tutor figure who serves as a model of instruction for the tyro. Such a tutor must have created for himself a specific modus vivendi which is pertinent to the tyro's immediate emotional needs. The tyro … cannot become as adept as the tutor. But he can learn some partial lessons, and he can, in processive pragmatic fashion, learn who and what he is at the specific time of the learning. He can also lay plans for the immediate future. These last two points should be borne in mind because they help to explain why absolute systems are incompatible with Hemingway's vision of himself and the world. Hemingway's view of man … accepts and even demands the possibility of change. Thus his epistemological stories are "growth" stories in which the new shapes of growth are unpredictable beforehand. (p. 95)

"In Another Country" seems at first to be more of a sketch than a story. Narrated in first person by Nick Adams, it describes in seemingly random fashion his experiences undergoing rehabilitation treatment for his knee wound in Milan. He, along with other wounded, reports to the hospital every afternoon to work on the therapeutic machines. He becomes friendly with three wounded officers, all of them deservedly decorated for valor in combat…. It is clear that the experiences of battle and of being wounded have set the four of them off "in another country" from the people who jostle them on the streets. Similarly, the hospital is separated from the main part of the city by a network of canals; and, from whatever direction it is approached, it can only be entered by crossing a bridge. However, Nick's three friends, "the hunting hawks" who have proved their bravery, read the papers on his decorations and realize that he is not really one of them; his decorations have been given him because he is an American. He is not friendly with them after that because they have already crossed a bridge that is at the moment beyond his approach. Nick does stay friendly with a boy who was wounded on his first day at the front, because he also is not a "hawk."

It is at this point that Nick meets the Major … and from this point on in the story, Nick appears to become merely a spectator-recorder of the Major's travail. But to read the story in this way is to miss Hemingway's careful construction of back-ground in the first section. Nick knows that he would not have performed as bravely as the "hunting hawks," and he worries about his real or potential lack of bravery. Set apart by an unrecrossable bridge from the people who have not suffered the immediate violence of war, he is also set apart from those who have fought bravely and without fear: "I was very much afraid to die, and often lay in bed at night by myself, afraid to die and wondering how I would be when I went back to the front again." The Major's agony and his heroic hold on dignity under the burden of his wife's sudden death—a dignity which does not place itself above showing emotion in basic physical ways—become an object lesson to Nick which is directly relevant to his concern with bravery. The "hunting hawks" believe in bravery; it is because they do that they can reject Nick. The Major "did not believe in bravery"; he also had no confidence in the machines that were to restore his hand. He does believe in grammar, in punctuality, in courtesy, and in following the line of duty. And in the story he becomes an exemplar of courage and of dignified resolution in meeting disaster. His actions point out to Nick that a man should find things he cannot lose; that is, a man should slice away from his thoughts and convictions all the illusions that he can live without. And to Nick's immediate concern, he demonstrates that bravery is merely another illusion. He teaches Nick that there is "another country" he can enter which is open to him even with his fear. And this is a country in which unillusioned courage is a more valuable human quality than bravery.

One of Hemingway's masterful achievements in modern short-story technique is exhibited in the structure of this story. His device of "the irony of the unsaid" takes on another employment in his handling of the educational climax of Nick's studies. Nowhere does he indicate that Nick learned anything from the Major's example. Reading the story swiftly, it appears that Nick is not even present at the denouement. But from the first magnificent paragraph describing the cold autumn in Milan to the last description of the Major looking emptily out the window, the selection of every detail is controlled by Nick's mind and by his urgent concern with his fear. The power of the Major's resolution is communicated because it makes a powerful impression on Nick. Nick does not state its impression on him, probably because he has not yet synthesized his impressions into a conceptual form. But they have been synthesized in the narrative structure through juxtaposition and a repetition of the bravery theme. Hemingway once wrote proudly that he chose not to put a "Wow" at the ends of his stories; he preferred to let them end and hang fire, as it were. In a story like "In Another Country," we can see the device handled with consummate artistry. The reader is forced into a participative position; he dots the "i's" and crosses the "t's" and learns Nick's lesson simultaneously with him. At times Hemingway's use of this structure becomes so over subtle as to be entirely lost to a reader, and the story drifts away into vignette or sketch ("The Light of the World," "Wine of Wyoming"); less frequently, the lesson is too well learned and overly articulated at the end, and the story becomes the text for a moralizing sermon ("The Gambler, The Nun, and the Radio"). But in those cases where the "wow" is deliberately withheld to create a cogent meaningful ambiguity at the end, the tutor-tyro stories can be extremely effective. (pp. 96-8)