Caleb Rogers

Professor Adam Diehl

HUMN 2010

2/9/2024

Reading Analysis: The Nick Adams Stories

Throughout the many stories in The Nick Adams Stories, Nick suffers from many

heartbreaks throughout his life. Still, the one that has the most significant impact on him is the

heartbreak he gave himself when he broke up with Marjorie. After the heartbreak, Nick almost

immediately regrets it, and while he is trying to drown his sorrows with liquor with Bill, Nick

talks about how unsure he is that he did the right thing. He even goes as far as to state that he

doesn’t even know why he ended things with Marjorie, as he just felt like he had to do it. With

the way that Bill tries to make Nick see the breakup as a good thing, it can be assumed that Bill

put the idea of Marjorie being a bad partner for Nick in his head, and when he was at his lowest

point, he decided to follow Bill’s advice as he was desperate for happiness. This self-inflicted

heartbreak marks a turning point in his life and changes him as a person.

One way that Nick’s heartbreak with Marjorie changed his life is that it was a big reason

why he went to the war and led to other traumas. One night during the war, when Nick talks to

his orderly, John, he is questioned as to why he got involved in the war in the first place. Nick's

response to the question is that he doesn’t know, which signifies that he didn’t have a reason not

to join the war. After Nick’s breakup with Marjorie, in a conversation with his friend Bill, he

mentions that he and Marjorie were talking about getting married. Of course, due to the breakup,

those plans went out the window along with his main reason to stay in a safe environment. If

Nick had stayed with Marjorie, he most likely would have stayed with his wife, but instead, he
threw that reasoning away and threw himself into the war, which led to him getting shell shock

and suffering through the horrors of war.

Another way that his self-inflicted heartbreak majorly affected him was that it made him

far more jaded on ideals involving love and marriage. In the scene involving him and his orderly,

one of the topics that comes up during their late-night conversation is marriage. During their talk,

John makes multiple remarks about how Nick isn’t married and how all men should be married,

but Nick brushes it off. The way that Nick inquires about John’s wife and kids gives the

impression that a part of Nick feels wistful about the idea of marriage, but another stronger part

of him doesn’t think he deserves it after he threw his potential marriage away. This mindset leads

to another conversation he has with his friend George in the story Cross-Country Snow. In this

conversation, Nick brings up how women in the area only want to get married when they get

pregnant and that the girl he was with at the time, Helen, is now pregnant. The way he talks

about these two things makes him come across as disgruntled about the pregnancy. In Nick’s

eyes, this pregnancy has just trapped him onto the trajectory of a marriage he didn’t want.

Furthermore, when George asks if Nick is happy about the pregnancy, Nick says that he’s only

happy about it now. This implies that Nick is trying to force himself to be happy about the

situation and is willing to marry Helen, even if it wasn’t what he wanted in the first place.

Ultimately, Nick threw away a marriage to a woman he loved, and because of that, he ended up

forcing himself to marry a woman he didn’t have genuine feelings for due to a pregnancy.
 Works Cited

Hemingway, Ernest. The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Charles Scribner’s

Sons, 1996.