Cycles of Violence in The Battler Essay -- Battler Essays

Cycles of Violence in The Battler      Ã‚   Ernest Hemingway's "The Battler" provides a continued account of Nick Adams' dangerous and violent life. Previous stories compiled in "The Short Stories" edition of Hemingway's work documents some of the tribulations of Nick Adams, one of Hemingway's protagonists. Apparently, Nick has been plagued by moments of sheer humility, terror, and immutable violence. In the Hemingway short 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 insensitive to Nick's 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 two 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 case 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 Nick's predicament after the fact 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 man's life, but has taken part in its occurrence. The two become linked in this dangerous moment. In a moment of foreshadowing, Nick's future teeters on the possibility of a life like Ad's. Before dinner, Ad and Bugs had speculated: "He says he's never been crazy, Bugs." "He's got a lot coming to him," Bugs had softly spoken. (p. 133) Nick's scars and hits are, at this time in his life, only more easily hidden than Ad's. Too late, however: Ad and Bugs have seen his potential to become "crazy," a "battler" as well, though he knows that, as in Ad's case, yours is rarely the winning side. Bibliography Hemingway, Ernest: The Short Stories. Simon and Schuster, New York, First Scribner Paperback Fiction Edition, 1995