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"Big Two-Hearted River" is a two-part short story written by American author Ernest Hemingway, published in the 1925 Boni & Liveright edition of ''In Our Time'', the first American volume of Hemingway's short stories. It features a single protagonist, Hemingway's recurrent autobiographical character Nick Adams, whose speaking voice is heard just three times. The story explores the destructive qualities of war which is countered by the healing and regenerative powers of nature. When it was published, critics praised Hemingway's sparse writing style and it became an important work in his canon. The story is one of Hemingway's earliest pieces to employ his Iceberg Theory of writing; a modernist approach to prose in which the underlying meaning is hinted at, rather than explicitly stated. "Big Two-Hearted River" is almost exclusively descriptive and intentionally devoid of plot. Hemingway was influenced by the visual innovations of Cézanne's paintings and adapted the painter's idea of presenting background minutiae in lower focus than the main image. In this story, the small details of a fishing trip are explored in great depth, while the landscape setting, and most obviously the swamp, are given cursory attention. == Background and publication == In 1922, Hemingway moved with his wife Hadley to Paris, where he worked as foreign correspondent for the ''Toronto Star''. He became friends with and was influenced by modernist writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.〔Desnoyers, Megan Floyd. ("Ernest Hemingway: A Storyteller's Legacy". ) JFK Library. Retrieved September 30, 2011〕 The year 1923 saw his first published work, a slim volume titled ''Three Stories and Ten Poems'', followed the next year by another collection of short vignettes, ''in our time'' (without capitals).〔Baker (1972), 15–18〕〔Oliver (1999), 168–169〕 Hoping to have ''in our time'' published in New York, in 1924 he began writing stories to add to the volume with "Big Two-Hearted River" planned as the final piece. He started writing the story in May of that year but did not finish until September as he spent the summer helping Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford launch the journal ''the transatlantic review''.〔Mellow (1992), 271〕 "Big Two-Hearted River" has strong autobiographical elements.〔Benson (1989), 350〕 During World War I, Hemingway signed on as a member of the Red Cross at age 19, and was sent to the Italian Front at Fossalta as an ambulance driver.〔Mellow (1992), 48–49〕 On his first day there, he helped to retrieve the remains of female workers killed in a munitions factory explosion, about which he later wrote in ''Death in the Afternoon'': "I remember that after we searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments".〔Mellow (1992), 57〕 A few days later, on July 8, 1918, he was severely wounded when a mortar bomb exploded between his legs.〔Mellow (1992), 57–60〕 He was sent to a hospital in Milan where he recuperated for six months; after his return home, he went on a week-long fishing and camping trip in September 1919 with two high school friends to the backcountry near Seney in Michigan's Upper Peninsula—a trip that became the inspiration for "Big Two-Hearted River".〔Putnam, Thomas. ("Hemingway on War and Its Aftermath" ). ''The National Archives''. Retrieved November 30, 2011〕〔Mellow (1992), 101〕 The manuscript shows the use of plural pronouns, suggesting that in an early version more characters were included, but by publication any mention of his friends or the townspeople had been removed—leaving Nick alone in the woods.〔Johnston (1984), 35〕 When Hemingway asked her opinion of the draft in October 1925, Stein advised him to cut an 11-page section of stream-of-consciousness reminiscences written from Nick's point of view. Hemingway took her advice, reworked the ending, and wrote to his editor: "I have discovered that the last eleven pages of the last story in the book are crap".〔Mellow (1992), 273–277〕 Biographer James Mellow writes that at this early stage in his career Hemingway had not developed his talent enough to fully and capably integrate self-reflections in his writing; Mellow also believes the deleted passage might have been a "tour-de-force" had it been written at a more mature period in Hemingway's development.〔 In January 1925, while wintering in Schruns, Austria, waiting for a response from query letters written to friends and publishers in America, Hemingway submitted the story to be published in his friend Ernest Walsh's newly established literary magazine ''This Quarter''. Walsh bought it for 1,000 French francs, the highest payment Hemingway had yet received for a piece of fiction.〔Reynolds (1989), 263, 271〕 On October 5, 1925, the expanded edition of ''In Our Time'' (with conventional capitalization in the title) was published by Boni & Liveright in New York.〔Baker (1972), 410; Oliver (1999),169〕 The last story in the volume was the two-part "Big Two-Hearted River".〔Flora (2004), 41〕 The piece was later included in Hemingway's collection ''The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories'' published in October 1938, and in two collections of short stories published after his death, ''The Nick Adams Stories'' (1972) and ''The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition'' (1987).〔Baker (1972), 412; Oliver (1999), 394〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Big Two-Hearted River」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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