Cycles of Violence in The Battler Essay -- Battler Essays

Cycles of Violence in The Battler Ernest Hemingways The Battler provides a continued account of Nick Adams dangerous and violent tone. Previous stories compiled in The goldbrick Stories edition of Hemingways work documents some of the tribulations of Nick Adams, one of Hemingways protagonists. Apparently, Nick has been plagued by moments of sheer humility, terror, and immutable violence. In the Hemingway piffling story Indian Camp, Nick is a young boy who witnesses a dreadfully difficult birth by a Native American woman, enduring all the while the hubris of his surgeon father, who is contestibly unreactive to Nicks innocence. Once the birth has ended, the husband of the woman is found with a freshly slit throat, again viewed by the young Nick. In The End of Something, another short story from the same compilation, an older Nick Adams breaks of a listless relationship with Marjorie, his girlfriend. Nick reveals his disgust with being committed to Marjorie during a fishing trip, and the proximity of the both in the boat coupled with the inability for either to escape the immediate situation results in moments of tense humiliation for both. Indeed, the scene percolates with subdued violence. In the incident of The Battler, the violence is not so heavily subdued. Nick is traveling on a train, probably as a vagabond, and is knocked off of his mode of transportation with a clout to the head by a lousy crut of a brakeman. (p. 129) This is not a narrated situation, but the reader is made aware of Nicks predicament after the point as Nick finds himself watching the caboose going out of sight around the curve and touch(ing) the bump over his eye. (p. 129) He finds his hands scraped and the skin on his knees b... ...not escape his destiny he is a living punching bag, and Nick, in his timely fashion, has not only witnessed another violent episode in this mans life, but has interpreted part in its occurrence. The two become linked in this dangerous moment. In a moment of foreshadowing, Nicks future teeters on the possibility of a life like Ads. Before dinner, Ad and Bugs had speculated He says hes never been crazy, Bugs. Hes got a lot coming to him, Bugs had softly spoken. (p. 133) Nicks scars and hits are, at this time in his life, only more tardily hidden than Ads. Too late, however Ad and Bugs have seen his potential to become crazy, a battler as well, though he knows that, as in Ads case, yours is seldom the winning side. Bibliography Hemingway, Ernest The Short Stories. Simon and Schuster, New York, First Scribner Paperback Fiction Edition, 1995