Ryan Reeves

Humn 2010

Professor Adam Diehl

9 February 2024

What breaks Nick Adams’ heart?

Nick Adams struggles through a life full of heartbreak from an extremely young age. It

was extremely difficult to select a specific heartbreak in Nick’s life that was most significant.

However, the heartbreak that I feel is most significant to Nick’s life is the heartbreak he

experienced in his relationship with his father.

In the early Nick Adams stories like Indian Camp, The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,

and Ten Indians, Nick is clearly closer to his father than his mother. The main example of this

relationship dichotomy is shown in The Doctor and The Doctor’s Wife. It is shown when after

Nick’s mother asks his father to send Nick to see her, Nick responds, “I want to go with you”

(Hemingway, 103). This shows the blatant disregard Nick has in his relationship with his mother.

After this story Nick’s mother seems to just fade out of importance which represents the

disconnect between Nick and his mother.

I believe that Nick’s father is his most significant heartbreak as his father was his main

role model throughout his life and the person he spent a majority of his early life with. Nick

experiences a lot of trauma from situations he experienced with his father. The main example is

from the story Indian Camp when Nick watches his father perform a botched cesarean section on

a pregnant Native American woman. After the birth of the child, the father of the baby commits

suicide by slitting his own throat in the bunk bed above the mother of his child. I also believe

that another aspect that contributed to the overall heartbreak he experienced in his life was that
he at some point experienced the arguing between his parents like the example from the Doctor

and the Doctor’s Wife.

Nick grew up being taught by his father the ways that alcohol can poison a man while

simultaneously watching his father slip into an alcohol addiction. This is just another example of

the way that Nick’s father broke his heart. A man that he looked up to and respected constantly

contradicted his own teachings. As Nick grew in age he and his father seemed to have grown

distant as in the later stories Nick’s father is rarely mentioned. A prime example of Nick’s

learned affliction to alcohol is primarily shown in Cross-Country Snow, when Nick asks George,

“Should we have another bottle?” (Hemingway, 187). In this scene Geroge and Nick are having

a conversation that quickly becomes uncomfortable. Nick says this quote in an attempt to distract

himself from the conversation, a tactic his father and many other people in his life often used.

Ultimately, I feel as though the other examples of heartbreak that Nick experiences

within his life are nearly the tip of the iceberg. The main body of the iceberg is the heartbreak

Nick develops over the years from his relationship with his father. Nick’s father transitions from

being the most significant figure and role model in his life, to being someone he rarely mentions

at all. I feel that this is because over the years as he began to grow wiser, Nick realized his father

was not the respectable man he thought he was when he was a little boy. I get the sense that Nick

began to realize that a lot of the traumatic and terrible things he experienced in his early

childhood were because of his father.

From the outside perspective, Nick’s father is not a responsible parental figure as he

allows Nick to experience several awful tragedies at a young age. His father is also extremely

neglectful of his mother when she seems to be ill regardless of whether her sickness is physically

or mentally. Nick learns this trait of neglect from his father and it clearly seems to carry over into
his future relationships. In conclusion, I believe that Nick would have grown to be a much better

man and not struggled through so much depression, alcoholism, and overall heartbreak had he

met someone that set a better example of being a man than his father did.
 Works Cited

Hemingway, Ernest. The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway).

New York: Charles Scribrur’s Sons, 1966.