Short Story

The Battler by Ernest Hemingway was published in the short story collection In Our Time in 1925 and was the fourth story about Nick Adams, a semi-autobiographical character of Hemingway’s.

In The Battler Nick gets tricked by a man into coming close to him, in which case the man knocked him to the ground, even though there was really no logical reason for him to do it. Nick is mad and promises himself he’ll never let himself be taken advantage of it in that way again. When he meets a man along the road he tells him how he’ll attack him and return the favor the next time he gets a chance.

Soon, however, Nick learns that the man is very disfigured, with one ear missing, and discovers that the man is none other than Ad Francis, who was a famous boxing champion at one time. Ad explains how he is crazy, and invites Nick to eat with him and his negro friend Bugs.

They start to eat but Ad gets pretty upset, saying that Nick had no business being there and that is was uncalled for to come in and eat his food. He is about to attack Nick, but the negro manages to knock him unconscious before anything happens. The negro explains how he met Al in jail, and they hit it off, and how he pretends to be crazy even though he isn’t. He tells how Al took too many beatings, and then had his wife divorce him amidst rumors they were brother and sister. Now the ex-wife paid all their expenses so they could just roam around and do as they please.

The obvious message of the story is that Nick was young and wanted to fight, but then he met someone who had fought (not to mention gotten involved in women!) and was now disfigured and in bad shape. Plus it gives the reader a warning against women, since it was a woman who made him crazy in the end.

An interesting thing is that they talk about how completely crazy Al is, although he doesn’t appear to be that crazy. He does get mad at Nick for eating with them after he invited them himself, but only after Nick didn’t lend him his knife at the behest of the negro. Although things escalate quickly, it is not really unreasonable for him to be mad at Nick for not lending him something after Al is sharing his food with him. It’s not that Al is going out of reality, but that he has a lot of aggression and is willing to start a fight and inflict serious violence with only what most people would consider insignificant provocation. His imbalanced aggression is a result of his failure with women.

The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife by Ernest Hemingway was published in the short story collection In Our Time in 1925 and was the third story about Nick Adams, a semi-autobiographical character of Hemingway’s.

Nick’s father, a doctor, enlists the help of an Indian man named Dick Boulton to assist him in cutting logs. The logs were lost off of a boat, and would never be used, so Nick’s dad takes them from himself. Dick wants to see who the logs originally belonged to, and accuse his boss of stealing the logs. Nick’s dad doesn’t like that, and says for Dick not to saw them up if he believes them to be stolen, eventually exploding into a fight.

Nick’s dad is forced to walk off because Dick is a bigger man, and when he tells his wife that Dick was trying to start a fight because he owed him money, she refuses to believe it and says that no one could be that bad. She asks for her son, but when her husband leaves and finds him he asks to go with his dad to find black squirrel’s and he agrees, ignoring the request of Nick’s mother.

The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife shows how important honor is to a man. Everyone knows what is going on with the logs, but Nick’s dad will not allow himself to be characterized as a thief, which he of course is not. It is hard to tell whether Dick really does owe money to Nick’s dad, but it seems likely because he’s a doctor and doctor’s are expensive. If that is the case, then Dick is able to easily get at Nick’s dad simply by making an implicit attack on the man’s honor. What is ironic is that if Nick’s dad was really and truly a thief, the charge that he was stealing would not bother him; it is only because of his honorable that an attack of inhonorability can get to him.

The main point of the story, however, judging both by the content and the title, is the relationship between the doctor and his wife. She lives near men, but she is not there when the action takes place. She gives advice on how her husband should see things and what he should do, but he doesn’t really take it seriously. She asks to see her son, but even this is not granted her. Even though she thinks she is part of the world of doing, of men, of working, really she is very far away from it.

Indian Camp by Ernest Hemingway was published in the short story collection In Our Time in 1925 and was the second story about Nick Adams, a semi-autobiographical character who appears in a slew of connected Hemingway stories. It is the first one published, as its predecessor was cut out by Hemingway.

Nick comes along with his father, who is a doctor, to help deliver an Indian baby. He is forced to perform a c-section despite a complete absence of medical materials of antiseptics, which makes the mother have quite a few yells of pain. Unfortunately her husband and unable to bear it, and he decides to kill himself.

Nick is surprised at the man’s suicide but his father reassures him that death isn’t all that bad. Nick thinks to himself that he will never die. The theme of not dying is something that sometimes recurs in Hemingway’s stories.

Indian Camp juxtaposes the brutal experience Nick witnesses with his pleasant feeling on return that he will never die. After seeing such a painful birth and then a suicide, it is hard to believe that immediately the young boy had gained a sense of immortality. It is likely a commentary of the strength of youth and nature versus more painful things in life.

Hemingway frequently paired nature with positivity in his stories, and the boy is strong enough to withstand his vision of pain because of the stronger power of beauty, nature, and the goodness and strength inherent in man. It is quite impressive that Hemingway wrote a story chiefly about negativity that ends up really being about the triumph of strength in the world, and something that he continues to do in his later stories.

On the Quai at Smyrna was a short story written by Ernest Hemingway in his short story collection In Our Time in 1925 and is told from the viewpoint of a Grecian man who is on the scene at a strange event. The strange thing is how people are screaming at midnight, and a number of other weird occurrences.

The story is ambiguous, but it’s safe to say that it is in response to the Great Fire of Smyrna that took place in 1922. It was a catastrophic fire that took place during the Greco-Turkish war, killing tens of thousands of people. Hemingway probably wrote the piece on a supposition of what the fire might’ve appeared like to someone like our narrator, who didn’t even know what was going on.

Although the narrator is unaware of the fire, he notes a bunch of things happening that he wouldn’t have expected. When they came in to attack the Turks, they were merely fired at lightly instead of greatly attacked. There were tons of dead babies and other horrible stuff in the water, although he tries to dismiss it at the end.

This is a pretty short story, but an interesting one. Hemingway was well known to write about historical events, and I imagine it would’ve been a lot more interesting if we were actually living at the time of this war. Given the fact that we are not it isn’t really too relevant for us today, but it’s a nice perspective piece.