Nick Adams was Ernest Hemingway’s first major literary protagonist. In some twenty stories and two vignettes Hemingway created a character that was in many respects a product of his own youth. In their published order those stories tell the story of Nick Adams as he develops in a world very like to real one. The character’s metamorphosis is a series of encounters with the harsh and pleasurable realities of life. Nick Adams grows and moves in a realistic world where events take place in fortuitous, if not gratuitous, fashion. Together his experiences suggest a figure of man in the modern age.
Hemingway’s mode of writing with his character was characterological: Nick’s development traces from the feeling, reacting subject he is in the early stories to the perceiver and doer he is in the later stories. While Hemingway doesn’t create a continuous chronology (age wise) for his character, he frequently shifted the narrative point of view to Nick, thereby implying his continued characterological growth. The senses of renewal and acquisition of a complex consciousness in Nick disclose Hemingway’s energetic mode of writing.
Hemingway wrote the Nick Adams stories over a ten year period. His fashioning of Nick Adams follows a concave emotive curve. The world and the experiences of Nick Adams are coordinates of Hemingway’s realism which engages a network of motifs, images and symbols. The themes of loss and death are juxtaposed in the later stories with elements of irony, satire and comedy. Hemingway’s use of image and technique reveal a complex vision of man and world that is intricately woven throughout the stories. The overarching ethos of the Nick Adams stories is one of dying and rebirth.