Literary Devices in Big Two-Hearted River (Parts I and II)
Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Setting
Hemingway gives us enough information to pinpoint where this story takes place—except then he throws us off with the title. Hemingway himself wrote in “The Art of the Short Story” (Source) th...
Narrator Point of View
“Wait a second, Shmoop,” you might be saying. “If there is a third person narrator, how can it be a character—nay, the character—in the story?” Excellent question, dear reader. Here’s...
Genre
To say that “Big Two-Hearted River” is both a drama and a war drama is not as redundant as you might think. Let’s start with the first one. There is definitely some major drama in this story,...
Tone
No, we don’t mean technical like an Ikea diagram. We mean that you can basically learn how to camp and fish from this story. Here’s what we mean:Nick tied the rope that served the tent for a ri...
Writing Style
William Faulkner, another twentieth-century American literary behemoth, famously said that Hemingway never used a word that would send a reader running to the dictionary. He was being snide about i...
What's Up With the Title?
Yeah, that’s a good question, because though there is a Two-Hearted River in Michigan, it isn’t the river Hemingway is writing about. Here’s Hemingway in a piece he wrote called “The Art of...
What's Up With the Ending?
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 i...
Tough-o-Meter
You won’t have any trouble reading “Big Two-Hearted River”—in fact, you’ll probably power through it pretty quickly—but you might get to the end of it and find yourself scratching your...
Plot Analysis
Guess Who’s Back (Hint: It’s Not Slim Shady) Think of this as the first shot of a movie: a man gets off of a train. He seems to be our protagonist (that’s a fancy word for main character)....
Trivia
Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway said of “Big Two-Hearted River” that “The change of name was made purposely, no...
Steaminess Rating
There is no sex in this book, no violence (unless you count the implied violence of the war, or the violence of gutting a fish), and no crude language except when Nick eats his dinner before it’s...
Allusions
The only shout-outs we get in this story have to do with geography. They help situate us by giving us some context—the mention of Seney tells us that the story takes place in the upper peninsula...