A proper consideration of the Nick Adams stories has been seriously bedevilled by the current critical orthodoxy surrounding the notion of 'initiation'. The desire to 'initiate' or 'educate' Nick is more apparent in the critics than in his creator who, for the most part, is content to let Nick fool around, in and around Michigan, before lighting out for the territory ahead—Europe. The reason for this pedagogical obsession is to be sought in the desire of the critics to relate the Nick stories to the early novels, especially The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, and see in Nick dim adumbrations of the sensitive but impotent Jake Barnes and the equally sensitive but potent Frederick Henry. A new departure with the same end in view (viz. Nick's 'initiation') has been to see the 'complex unity' of In Our Time by the simple manoeuvre of converting even non-Nick stories into crypto-Nick stories, thus giving Nick more chances for education [see excerpt above by Clinton S. Burhans, Jr.]. Meanwhile, manful efforts are being made through the columns of Studies in Short Fiction to establish the splendid autonomy of the stories and even pieces like 'The End of Something' and 'The Three-Day Blow' which tell the same story, are allowed, like Himalayan peaks, to exist in splendid isolation. But even here the old siren song of initiation is heard with all the sweetness of heard melodies. We must remain thankful that the two parts of 'Big Two-Hearted River' are still seen as parts of the same whole. It is to be hoped that critical ingenuity will not introduce a rift at least here.
'Initiation' was first employed by Philip Young in his early study in 1952 to describe the character of the Nick Adams stories in In Our Time, although Edmund Wilson, in his still useful 1939 essay [see excerpt above] had already laid the foundations. 'A typical Nick Adams Story,' writes Young, 'is of an intiation.' And later, more definitively, he observes: 'The pattern of Nick Adams' development … is of a boy who, while with his father up in Michigan, and without him on his own as a hobo or with friends, has been learning some lessons about life' (italics mine). This definition seems to have had a hypnotic influence on Hemingway criticism, for, with minor exceptions, many later writers on Hemingway have been under its spell…. Joseph De Falco's The Hero in Hemingway's Short Stories [see excerpt above] is written directly under the protective shadow of Young and although he is patently annoyed when the stories don't fit the master's categories, he consistently toes the line. And so does Earl Rovit in his 1963 study: 'For convenience' sake I will refer to the Nick Adams hero as the tyro and to the code-hero as the tutor: for it is basically an educational relationship, albeit a very one-sided one, which binds them together [see excerpt above].
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