Nick Adams' Rite of Passage

After I finished In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway I was desperate for a connection. I felt that while reading the whole book, I was trying to find something that brought the book together as a whole. I knew that there wasn't going to be a obvious connection between all of the stories and chapters in the books but I felt that there was something significant about the Nick Adams stories. Through out the Nick Adams stories in this book, we see Nick change and in a way go through a rite of passage.

As we start the book, the second story we encounter is "Indian Camp." In that story, we see Nick as a young, innocent boy, that is until the end of the story. Even in this story, we see Nick evolve. Some of that innocence is stripped away. Nick starts asking his dad some deep questions about life and death. Even though his dad is responding in short answers as if trying to end the conversation, Nick continues on asking questions and thinking about it even though the conversation is over.

A few chapters later and we see an older Nick. This is a slightly more mature Nick than we have seen before, but he still ends up trouble. Nick is traveling around on the trains until he got kicked off by the brakeman that threw him off but not before giving him a black eye. This for me symbolized that Nick not found himself or a place for himself. It was as if he was traveling to find out who he was, rushing from place to place until he found that. Nick starts talking to Ad Francis and almost ends up in a fight with him, but he is rescued by Bugs who knocks Ad out. To me, this drove home the fact that Nick was still a child and needed protecting. He hasn't really learned how to take care of himself.

Finally in the last two stories, "Big Two-Hearted River Part 1" and  "Big Two-Hearted River Part 2", we see Nick mature and become an adult. He has learned to slow down and enjoy life. He is able to make a nice, though temporary home for himself. He is alone and able to care for himself. He doesn't need anybody there to help him. For the first time we see Nick being able to take care of himself. We have seen Nick goes from a small innocent child to a man capable of taking care of himself without doubting himself.

"I was Nam"

So we all just finished The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien last night and there were a lot of surprising chapters. One of the ones I found the most shocking was “The Ghost Soldiers.” Throughout The Things They Carried, we gained sympathy towards Tim O’Brien but in “The Ghost Soldiers”, we see a different, more cynical side of him that we had yet to see. It is important to note the obvious differences in this story compared to the others in the book. “The Ghost Soldiers” was written in first person, like a few others in this story, but it lacked a metafictional element to it. It also seemed to be focused more on the plot and not on the emotions of the characters which might be typical for a story but not really typical for a story in this book. “The Ghost Soldiers” was one of the few stories in this collection that I wasn’t constantly debating the truthfulness of; but somehow that added to the intensity of it.

O’Brien starts the story with a vignette with a surprisingly positive tone. It seemed as though this was the story we were going to get as we read the book. However, as we read on, we know that this is far from true. We are quickly acquainted with a new more evil side to him. I think this is the point where we really see the war getting to O’Brien in a way we had never seen before. He was so dead set on getting revenge on Bobby Jorgenson that he has a hard time keeping himself in grips with reality. As the chapter goes on, we see him compare himself and Jorgenson — saying that he understands what Jorgenson is going through — but can’t bring himself to stop himself from wanting revenge.

The most notable part of the story for me was,

“I was down there with him, inside him. I was part of the night. I was the land itself—everything, everywhere—the fireflies and paddies, the moon, the midnight rustlings, the cool phosphorescent shimmer of evil—I was atrocity—I was jungle fire, jungle drums—I was the blind stare in the eyes of all those poor, dead, dumbfuck ex-pals of mine—all the pale young corpses, Lee Strunk and Kiowa and Curt Lemon—I was the beast on their lips—I was Nam—the horror, the war.” (199)

O’Brien sees himself as the war. He is so wrapped up in it that the horror of the war is becoming him horror. It was if the war finally won and took over. It fell in line so well with what the rest of the book was trying to represent, only a small part of the war is the fighting itself. The other major part is the way it affects all that were involved. He saw himself as the cruelty the war actually was. He is not though; he showed his true colors by saying, “Enough.” (201)