On The Theme Of Initiation In Ernest Hemingway's The Nick Adams Stories

Among all the Hemingway's creations, The Nick Adams Stories is important, for Nick Adams is obviously autobiographical. He shares more with his creator a background and a history than any other characters do in his (Hemingway's) fictions.The Nick Adams Stories is a collection of some of Hemingway's short stories, which centers on the same protagonist, Nick Adams. In the chronicle of the stories, a young boy by the name of Nick Adams goes through his life with tribulations slowly learning and experiencing new things. He learns to accept his own and the world's limitations. The process of his transition, from dependence to self-reliance, obedience to self-determination, caring for individual problems to paying attention to social issues and innocence to maturity, can be described as that of initiation, the passage from childhood or adolescence to maturity and full membership in adult society.According to Young Philip, "a typical Nick Adams story is of an initiation, is the telling of an event which is violent or evil, or both, or at the very least is the description of an incident which brings the boy into contact with something that is perplexing and unpleasant" (Young, 1966: 67).This thesis explores the motif of initiation in The Nick Adams Stories. To see the effect of the initiation experience, the analysis of Hemingway's other two novels will be included in the paper as well.The thesis consists of five parts. Part one presents an introduction to the thesis by pointing out the purpose and the significance of this study. Part two is literature review. Part three explains the definition of "initiation story" by introducing the origin of the term and the theoretical approaches to the initiation theme in literature. In part three, the authors analyzes the initiation theme in four typical stories-Indian Camp, The Battler, A Way You 'll Never Be, and Fathers and Sons. These stories have been selected due to the fact that they give a representative overlook on different chapters of life of the protagonist, which are childhood, adolescence, youth and adulthood. Therefore, they are suitable for investigation of constituents and...