Hemmingway’s Big Two-Hearted River brings you on the journey of Nick Adams and his journey with his trauma. The recovery that Nick goes through is a lengthy process that is a struggle for Nick at times and Hemmingway uses many ways and tactics to get this across in the story. The ways he uses to show Nick’s growth varies and is unbalanced road to recovery, and it is shown in the story.
One of the tactics that Nick uses is to keep his mind off the things that can trigger and bother him in life by taking the time to do something with carefulness and slowness. He uses this strategy to do it with this amount of care and time to keep himself sane and to protect his fragile state of mind. As James Green states in “Symbolic Sentences in “Big Two-Hearted River,” “Nick does not want to think. To keep from thinking, he does things slowly, deliberately, and with care. His intense and even abnormal concentration on details of action reflects his attempt to keep from thinking.” This quote and point are one of the most used things that Nick does in the story and does not go unnoticed by the reader, the author Earnest Hemingway uses this strategically
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Nick knows himself very well and it is shown throughout the story as he makes decisions for himself and his well-being to do something or not do something. As Barbara Korn says in her piece “Form and Idea in Hemingway's ‘Two Big-Hearted River”, “he decides to think of the swamp as a challenge that he will be able to face in the future” {…} “Nick's realization that a time will come when he will be ready to face life as it is (981). This point is especially important for Nick and his recovery because it shows his self-growth and how he has recovered enough to know his boundaries, which is a huge milestone for him and his journey. Nicks self-awareness and growth is one of the biggest points in his