Does the story end with Nick frying up his two good fish, maybe making a nice white sauce to go with them, and serving it all up with a side of grilled asparagus? It’d be a very different story if he did. Instead, the story ends with Nick going back to his camp, looking back at the river through the trees, and saying, “There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp” (II.64).
Wait, the swamp? Really? The swamp gets the entire ending? That hardly seems fair, considering how it just showed up, like, a page before.
We talk about the swamp at length in our “Symbols” section. The gist of it is that the swamp is the exact opposite of Nick’s camp of neat and tidy control. In the camp, you can wait for the food to cool off before eating it, and you can kill a mosquito in your tent with a match. Not much goes wrong at the camp. Oh, and we should mention that the camp is the setting for the end of Part I, which forms a neat little juxtaposition with Part II.
The swamp is, in Nick’s words, “tragic.” It’s dark and creepy and it probably smells bad, and you’d have a heck of a time trying to fish in there. But, like most things in this story, the swamp is not just a swamp; it represents a threat to Nick’s psyche. You see, when Nick is able to manage things, he’s pretty happy (and he tells us so—twice—in I.7). But when things take a turn for the not-so-controllable, Nick gets upset.
So the swamp is like a threat that is always lurking out there, just beyond the river bend. Nick doesn’t have to delve into the dark places of his mind to confront it, but he can’t get rid of it either. Basically, he will have to eventually learn how to live with its presence—which is exactly what he resolves to do at the end of the story.