Drama; War Drama
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, but it’s masked by what seems like less-important drama. We’re talking about fishing. In a certain later work Hemingway ups the fishing drama and makes the fish in question gi-normous (we’re looking at you, The Old Man and the Sea), but here it’s just regular old fishing. If drama is about conflict, then sure, there is some conflict in fishing, but here’s a little secret: the conflict in “Big Two-Hearted River” isn’t really about fishing.
It’s actually about Nick. Specifically, it’s about Nick’s mental trauma and how he deals with it during a fishing trip. This is where the second genre starts to come in. Here’s a neat quote from Hemingway himself:
A story in this book called “Big Two-Hearted River” is about a boy coming home beat to the wide from a war. Beat to the wide was an earlier and possibly more severe form of beat, since those who had it were unable to comment on this condition and could not suffer that it be mentioned in their presence. So the war, all mention of the war, anything about the war, is omitted. “The Art of the Short Story” (Source)
Wow, so “Big Two-Hearted River” is not only about war, but about how there are aspects of war that can’t even be mentioned (we should add that shell shock was misunderstood and written off for a very long time). In this way, “Big Two-Hearted River” has war at its center, though it’s never going to get all Saving Private Ryan on you. Isn’t war’s aftermath just as much a part of what makes war war? We talk more about where war appears specifically in this story in Nick’s “Character Analysis,” so go ahead and click on over in that direction.