Nick Adams
A young man from northern Michigan who turns up in three of the fourteen stories, and in Hemingway's other books as well.
To find out what happened, and then to get away from it. He makes his father tell him what he saw in the woods; he walks across town to warn a man who turns out not to want warning; and afterwards he says he is going to get out of that town.
The book
At a glance
- Appears in three stories: 'The Killers', 'Ten Indians' and 'Now I Lay Me'
- Adams to the gunmen; Nick and Nickie in Michigan; Signor Tenente in Italy
- Summit, a small American town; the Michigan lake country; a farmhouse behind the Italian front
- An American lieutenant, wounded, unable to sleep unless there is a light
- The same name runs through In Our Time and Hemingway's later stories
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeNick Adams is a character the American writer Ernest Hemingway used again and again across his books. In Men Without Women, his 1927 collection of fourteen short stories, Nick appears in three of them. The three are separate stories and do not run on from one another.
In 'The Killers' he is a young man sitting at the end of the counter in a small-town lunch-room when two gunmen walk in to wait for a boxer they have been paid to shoot. In 'Ten Indians' he is a boy in the Michigan lake country, riding home from a Fourth of July in town and finding out something about a girl. In 'Now I Lay Me' he is the narrator, an American officer lying awake in a farmhouse seven kilometres behind the Italian front, afraid to sleep in the dark.
Hemingway had already written him through In Our Time, the collection published two years earlier, and went on using the name afterwards. A reader meeting him here for the first time is meeting a figure the author kept returning to for most of his working life.
How the book draws them
- 'The Killers': the boy at the end of the counterOne of the gunmen asks his name and he answers with his surname, Adams, which earns him the same nickname the man is already using for the counterman: bright boy. He is sent round behind the counter, then into the kitchen at gunpoint, and tied back to back with the cook with a towel in each of their mouths. The story notes, when he is untied, that he had never had a towel in his mouth before.
- 'The Killers': the errand nobody else will runAfter the gunmen leave, George the counterman suggests that somebody go and warn the boxer, then adds that Nick need not go if he does not want to. The cook tells him three times to stay out of it. Nick walks up the dark street to Hirsch's rooming-house anyway and knocks on the door of a man he barely knows.
- 'The Killers': what he says at the endBack at the lunch-room he reports that the man will not move and will not go to the police. “I can't stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he's going to get it,” he tells George. “It's too damned awful.”
- 'Ten Indians': teased about a girl called Prudence MitchellRiding home in a wagon with the Garner family, Nick is teased by the two Garner boys about Prudence Mitchell, a Native American girl from the camp near the lake. He denies it flatly and, sitting between them in the dark, feels hollow and happy inside himself to be teased about her.
- 'Ten Indians': the thing his father tells him at the kitchen tableHis father feeds him cold chicken and huckleberry pie and mentions that he walked up by the Indian camp and saw Prudie in the woods with a boy called Frank Washburn. Nick makes him repeat it, asks what they were doing, and then asks whether they were happy. His father goes out to the porch; when he comes back Nick has been crying and will not have more pie. In bed he thinks that his heart is broken, and in the morning he is awake a long time before he remembers it.
- 'Now I Lay Me': the man who will not sleep in the darkThe narrator has been blown up at night and felt his soul go out of his body and come back, so he will not shut his eyes in the dark. To fill the nights he fishes remembered trout streams in his head, working each one down and then back up again for the fish he missed. On the nights he cannot fish, he prays for everyone he has ever known, a Hail Mary and an Our Father each, which takes long enough that it is light by the end.
- 'Now I Lay Me': the one time the story gives him a nameThe narrator is called Signor Tenente by his orderly and is named only once, inside a childhood memory. His mother has cleaned out the basement and burned everything in it, including his father's collection of stone axes, skinning knives and arrowheads. His father rakes the blackened pieces out of the ashes and says, “Get a rake, Nick,”
None of the three stories resolves anything for him. 'The Killers' ends with Nick saying he is going to get out of town and George telling him he had better not think about it. 'Ten Indians' ends with him asleep, then awake in the morning wind for a long time before he remembers that his heart is broken. 'Now I Lay Me' ends with the narrator noting, from some later date, that he has never married after all.