Big Two-Hearted River

“Big Two-Hearted River” is told in the third person; however, the story often blends the narration seamlessly with Nick’s thoughts. This is called free indirect discourse. Rather than signaling the character’s thoughts by using attributive tags like “he thought,” Hemingway often narrates Nick’s emotional experience directly through Nick’s perspective: “I won’t try and flop it, he thought” (Paragraph 43). However, with free indirect discourse, readers see sentences like this: “He tested the knot and the spring of the rod by pulling the line taut. It was a good feeling” (Paragraph 48). Readers know that the “good feeling” is Nick’s, but there is no signal to alert this. The choice to use free indirect discourse is not accidental. More traditional third-person narration provides flexibility and a sense of objectivity, but it also lacks intimacy, while free indirect discourse provides both.

Situational irony is when what takes place in a narrative is the opposite of what was expected. It is a gap between expectations and reality. An example of situational irony in “Big Two-Hearted River” is the fact that Nick specifically chose to come to Seney to return to a familiar and nurturing place, but instead he finds a town gutted by fire. Trying to get as far away from the war as possible, Nick instead finds a town that looks like it has been bombed. He is thus forced into a confrontation with the trauma he has sought to escape. Unable to rely on the town to help him recover, he must instead turn to nature and to his own inner resources.

A metaphor is a direct comparison of one thing to another to help one understand more clearly. A simile is comparison of two things using the words “like” or “as” or a similar word. An example of a metaphor is “the world is your oyster,” whereas a simile would be “The world is like your oyster.” In “Big Two-Hearted River,” the narrator uses a simile to describe fish in the river: “As far down the long stretch as he could see, the trout were rising, making circles all down the surface of the water, as though it were starting to rain” (Paragraph 23). The simile compares one natural phenomenon to another, showing how closely Nick observes the rising of the fish and suggesting that he pays similarly close attention to the natural world throughout his life. Later. he describes the brightness of the water’s reflection: “the surface of the water was blinding as a mirror in sun” (Paragraph 84). To help readers visualize the water on the river, whether of fish rising or the reflection of the sun, the narrator uses similes. The narrator uses several similes in the text: He compares his tent hanging on a rope to a “canvas blanket on a clothesline” (Paragraph 25); the flapjack batter spreading on the hot pan to lava (Paragraph 43); and the feeling of weariness to a rock (Paragraph 71). In a passage describing grasshoppers, the narrator uses both a metaphor and a simile: “He turned over a log and just under the shelter of the edge were several hundred hoppers. It was a grasshopper lodging house” (Paragraph 40). Comparing the number of grasshoppers under the log to a lodging house gives us a sense of their large number. The narrator next uses a simile to compare the stiff grasshoppers to dead grasshoppers: “At first they made one flight and stayed stiff when they landed, as though they were dead” (Paragraph 40).