“Big Two-Hearted River” · 1925 · 3 min read

The war that isn’t there

By Shelly Brown

The story

“Big Two-Hearted River” closes Hemingway’s first story collection, In Our Time, and it is itself split into two parts. In Part I, Nick Adams steps off a train in Seney, Michigan, and finds the town burned to the ground. He hikes across the burned country with a heavy pack, finds a spot above the river, and makes camp. He pitches his tent, heats a can of pork and beans and a can of spaghetti, and makes coffee. In Part II, he wakes up, catches grasshoppers for bait, and spends the day fishing for trout.

That is almost the entire plot. Nick hooks and loses a huge trout, lands two good ones, cleans them, and looks downstream at a swamp he decides not to fish today. There is no argument, no villain, and no other character. On a first read, it can feel like nothing happens at all.

Below the surface

Nick is a veteran of World War I, but the story never says so. Readers know it from the other Nick Adams pieces in In Our Time, where he is wounded in Italy. In this story the war is the seven-eighths of the iceberg: completely underwater, but shaping everything above it. Nick’s careful routines, pitching the tent exactly right, making coffee, baiting the hook, work like a way of keeping his mind from going anywhere he does not want it to go.

The writing itself does the same thing. Many of the sentences are built the same simple way, a subject and then an action, one after another, like someone checking off steps on a list. When Nick loses the big trout, the sentences speed up and he has to sit down and wait for the feeling to pass. Hemingway uses rhythm to show how close to the edge Nick really is.

Even the landscape mirrors him. The town has burned, and the grasshoppers have turned black from living in the burned country. The setting is damaged the way Nick is, but it is also starting to recover. Downstream, the river runs into a swamp, where the water is deep and the fishing would be harder and riskier. Nick thinks that “In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure” (Hemingway, “Big Two-Hearted River”), and he tells himself there will be plenty of other days for the swamp. The swamp stands for everything Nick is not ready to face yet.

Hemingway’s Message

Hemingway’s message is that trauma does not have to be spoken to be present. A weaker writer would have Nick remember the war or explain how he feels. Hemingway trusts the reader to notice that a man who needs everything to be this orderly is holding something back. The story is about the war precisely because the war never appears.

He also suggests that healing is slow, physical, and unfinished. Nick does not get over anything in a single day. He gets through it by doing simple things well, one at a time, and by knowing when not to go into the swamp. For Hemingway, recovery is not a breakthrough. It is a discipline.

“Hills Like White Elephants” · 1927 · 3 min read

The word nobody says

By Shelly Brown

The story

An American man and a young woman called Jig sit outside a small train station in the Ebro valley in Spain, waiting for the express to Madrid. The story first appeared in Men Without Women, and it is only a few pages long. Almost all of it is their conversation over drinks: first beer, then a licorice-flavored liqueur called Anis del Toro.

They are arguing about an “operation” the man wants her to have. It is clearly an abortion, but neither of them ever says the word. Jig walks to the end of the station and looks out at the valley, comes back, and asks him to stop talking about it. At the end, the man carries their bags to the other platform, has a drink alone at the bar, and returns to find Jig saying she feels fine. We never learn what she decides.

Below the surface

The title comes from Jig looking across the valley and saying, “They look like white elephants” (Hemingway, “Hills”). A white elephant is something expensive and unwanted that no one knows what to do with. Jig’s comment sounds casual, but it points straight at the pregnancy the man wants to get rid of. He brushes it off, and that small moment shows how differently the two of them see the situation.

The man’s strategy is to sound reasonable. He tells her, “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig” (Hemingway, “Hills”), and keeps saying he only wants her to do it if she wants to. But he keeps bringing it back up, which shows the opposite. His calm words are a form of pressure. Jig answers with sarcasm, silence, and finally a plea for him to stop talking altogether.

Hemingway also uses the setting to show what is at stake. On one side of the station the country is dry and brown, with no shade. On the other side are fields of grain and trees along a river. When Jig looks at the green side, she talks about how they could have everything, then corrects herself and says they can’t. The two sides of the valley mirror the two futures in front of her. Hemingway barely tells us what either character is thinking, so the landscape has to say it for them.

Hemingway’s Message

Hemingway’s message is about how people use language to avoid the truth. The man talks constantly but never names what he is asking for, and his reassurances are really a way of getting what he wants. Jig says less, but she sees more, and her sarcasm is the most honest speech in the story.

He also shows how unequal the decision is. The man calls the operation simple because it will not happen to him, while Jig is the one who has to live with either future. By leaving the ending open, Hemingway makes the reader feel the weight of a choice the characters cannot even bring themselves to name.

“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” · 1933 · 2 min read

Holding back the dark

By Shelly Brown

The story

Late at night in a Spanish café, an old deaf man sits alone drinking brandy while two waiters watch him. The younger waiter wants the old man to leave so he can go home to his wife. The older waiter is in no hurry. The two of them mention that the old man tried to end his life the week before, and that detail hangs over the whole quiet scene.

Eventually the younger waiter refuses to pour another drink, and the old man pays and walks away. The older waiter closes up, walks to an all-night bar, and orders a coffee. The bar is bright, but not clean, and it is not the same. He heads home, knowing he will lie awake until daylight.

Below the surface

The story is built on the contrast between the two waiters. The young one has youth, a job, and someone waiting at home, and he cannot understand why anyone would sit in a café that late. The older waiter understands completely. He says he is one of those who likes to stay late, because some people need a place with light at night.

That idea gives the story its title. A clean, well-lighted café is not much, but it is a small kind of order. It is better than a bar or a dark room, because it keeps the feeling of emptiness away a little longer. That “nothing” finally gets a name when the older waiter recites a version of the Lord’s Prayer with the important words replaced by the Spanish word for nothing: “Our nada who art in nada” (Hemingway, “Clean”). It is a bleak moment, but an honest one.

The dialogue is so spare that it is sometimes hard to tell which waiter is speaking, and readers and editors have argued for decades about who says one confusing line. That uncertainty almost fits the story. The two waiters are different ages and in different places in life, but the line between them is thinner than the young one thinks.

Hemingway’s Message

Hemingway’s message is that everyone eventually faces the same emptiness, and what matters is how they hold it off. The younger waiter thinks he is safe because he has youth and someone at home, but the story suggests that confidence is temporary. The older waiter has already seen the “nada,” and his response is quiet dignity: keep the place clean, keep the lights on, and be patient with the people who need them.

Like Nick Adams’s careful routines in “Big Two-Hearted River,” the café is a ritual against something that cannot be fixed or even fully said. Hemingway does not offer a solution. He shows that small acts of order and compassion are how people get through one more night.

“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” · 1936 · 3 min read

One morning of courage

By Shelly Brown

The story

Francis Macomber is a wealthy American on an African safari with his wife, Margot, and a professional hunter named Robert Wilson. The story opens at lunch, with everyone pretending nothing has happened. Something has: earlier that day, Francis wounded a lion, and when it charged out of the tall grass, he turned and ran. Wilson killed it. Hemingway even briefly tells part of the hunt from the wounded lion’s point of view, so the reader feels it waiting in the grass.

Their marriage already runs on a trade: she is too beautiful for him to leave, and he is too rich for her to leave. His cowardice tips that balance toward her. In the car, Margot kisses Wilson in front of her husband, and that night she goes to Wilson’s tent. The next morning, on a buffalo hunt, everything changes, and by the end of that morning Francis is dead.

Below the surface

On the buffalo hunt, Francis feels something he has never felt before. Hemingway sums it up in one line: “Fear gone like an operation” (Hemingway, “Short Happy Life”). In a single morning Francis goes from a man who ran from a wounded lion to a man who cannot wait to follow a wounded buffalo into thick bush, and Hemingway shows how sudden and forceful the change is by comparing it to “a dam bursting” (Hemingway, “Short Happy Life”).

A dam usually holds back an amount of power keeping it from rushing out without control. In the story Hemingway uses Francis’s path and his sudden collapse to show that his confidence has been buried for a long time under piles of fear and doubt. His courage isn’t a short burst of bravery. It’s a release, from the walls that have trapped him and shaped how he sees himself. As this change happens, the way Francis relates to Margot shifts too. Before her opinions mattered a lot because he needed her approval and feared her disapproval.. As Francis becomes more sure of himself her judgment starts to lose its power. Her approval no longer feels essential.

Margot feels this shift, and it frightens her. When the wounded buffalo charges, Francis stands his ground, and Margot fires from the car, killing him with a shot to the back of the head. The narrator says she shot at the buffalo, but Wilson asks her, “Why didn’t you poison him?” (Hemingway, “Short Happy Life”). Hemingway never settles whether it was an accident. Either way, her shot comes at the exact moment Francis stops needing her approval.

Hemingway’s Message

Hemingway’s message is in the title. Francis lives for thirty-five years, but his “happy life” is only the stretch on the buffalo hunt when he is free of fear. Hemingway suggests that a short life lived with courage is worth more than a long life lived inside fear.

But he does not make courage simple. The same change that frees Francis makes him a threat to the person who benefited from his weakness, and it ends his life. Hemingway asks the reader to feel both the triumph and the price, and to see that real courage changes not just a person but every relationship around him.

“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” · 1936 · 2 min read

The stories he never wrote

By Shelly Brown

The story

Harry, a writer on safari in Africa, is dying. A small scratch from a thorn went untreated and turned into gangrene, and now he lies on a cot at camp with his wealthy wife, Helen, waiting for a plane that may not come in time. The story opens with a short note about a frozen leopard found near the summit of Kilimanjaro, and how no one has explained what the leopard was looking for that high up.

Over one long afternoon and night, Harry drinks, argues with Helen, and drifts into memories. In the morning, a plane arrives and carries him off toward the mountain. Then the story cuts back to camp, where Helen wakes to a hyena’s strange cry and finds Harry dead. The flight was something he imagined in his last moments.

Below the surface

As Harry waits, he thinks about everything he meant to write and never did. Hemingway sets these memories apart in italics: scenes from the war, from Paris, from skiing in the mountains. Each one is a story Harry knew how to tell but kept putting off. The italics turn the story into a record of lost work, written by a man who has run out of time to write it.

At first Harry blames Helen and her money for making him comfortable and lazy. He is cruel to her, even though she is caring for him. But as the story goes on, he admits the truth: he traded his own talent for an easy life, and no one forced him to. That honesty is the closest thing Harry gets to redemption.

The leopard ties it together. Like the leopard, Harry was reaching for something high and pure, and like the leopard, he died before anyone could understand what he was looking for. The dream flight toward the white summit gives him, for a moment, the clarity he never reached in life.

Hemingway’s Message

Hemingway’s message is about the cost of wasted talent. Harry had the material for great stories and the skill to write them, but he kept trading them for comfort and money. Death does not take his talent away. He had already given it up himself, and the italic memories are proof of everything he let slip.

Read next to “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” the message gets sharper. Both stories put a man on safari, in a marriage shaped by money, facing death. Francis finds his courage at the very end, while Harry finds only regret and a dream of the mountain. Together they suggest that what counts is not how long you live, but whether you live honestly while you still can.

About

About Seven Eighths

About me

I studied English at Ball State University in Indiana, where I first read Hemingway in an American literature survey course. We spent most of the semester on the big novels, and the short stories got about a week at the end. That week turned out to be the part of the class I remembered.

After college I went into a regular office job, and literature became something I did for myself instead of for a grade. I kept going back to the same handful of Hemingway stories, rereading them on weekends and filling the margins with notes.

Why this site exists

Hemingway’s novels get the attention: the movie adaptations, the reading lists, the famous quotes. His short stories, which are where his style is sharpest, usually get a single class period or a footnote. I always felt they deserved more than that, so I started writing about them.

Every post here follows the same shape: what happens in the story, what is going on below the surface, and what Hemingway is trying to say. The goal is not to replace reading the stories. It is to make you want to read them, or read them again.

All quotations come from The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (Finca Vigía edition), listed on the Works Cited page. I plan to keep adding stories.