“Nick Had Never Thought About That”: Ontological Shock and Disintegrating Identities in Hemingway’s “The Three-Blow” Hemingway’s short story from In Our Time has been located in history, but its location within the collection is due for a re-examination. Hemingway’s baseball references are successfully placed in history and, in turn, are then used as analogies for the loss of innocence Nick recently experienced.1 While productive in their own rights, it is important not only to understand where “The Three-Day Blow” lies within the history’s landscape, the story must be situated within the thematic developments of the collection. In “The End Something,” the defunct relationship between Nick and Marjorie merges with the lake’s denuded landscape to represent a clear loss. Lisa Tyler, in “’How Beautiful the Forests were Before the Loggers Came’: An Ecofeminist Reading of Hemingway’s ‘The End of Something’,” convincingly uses ecofeminist theories and biographical evidence to point out how Hemingway is mourning this loss with imagery of irreparable environmental damage.2 Tyler then calls for a re-examination of Hemingway’s views on “violence against animals, women, underprivileged men, and enemy soldiers, suggesting that he was more ecofeminist in his sympathies than his readers have yet acknowledged” (70). If the loss of innocence experienced by Nick Adams and the expanding sympathies displayed by an ecofeminist understanding of the collection help to illuminate the mindset Nick has when he meets up with his friend Bill, “The Three-Day Blow” holds important clues that uncover the influence these experiences have on Nick’s psychological perspectives. I contend that Nick’s appearance at Bill’s house initiates a different psychological construction of Nick’s identity, a construction that becomes an un-ending process, in order to reveal the suggested implications of Hemingway’s use of multiplied perspectives and perpetual
disintegration. My reading will focus how the fragmentation of a cubist anatomy is engendered by ideas of the supplement, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and perpetual disintegration. The previous stories in the collection suggest a sense of evolving disintegration, often accomplished through conflicting viewpoints expressed in seemingly simple dialogue. Before Nick ends his relationship with Marjorie, he also witnesses specific instances which engender his father’s crumbling façade. In a study of the miscommunication Hemingway achieved through dialogue, Robert Lamb notes, in “Hemingway and the Creation of Twentieth-Century Dialogue,” how “Indian Camp” becomes “Nick’s first encounter with ontological shock” (461). Lamb goes on to point out how the dialogue allows characters to break loose from social moorings, becoming transient modern individual. This type of shock is the means by which Nick’s first evolution of perspective takes place, and the treatment of death at the end of “Indian Camp” sets in motion a continually complicating view of the characters who “however limited their consciousnesses may be…possess the same complex unconscious motivations as any human characters” (Lamb 474). Such complexities and ontological questionings get at the heart of how my re-evaluation of “The Three-Day Blow” uncovers the implications arising from the disintegration of a previously complete and whole worldview. Consequently, Nick is struggling with how to put together the now-multiple perspectives about life witnessed throughout the first two decades of his life. Bill’s role, though, is not one of mere sounding board for Nick’s thoughts; Bill becomes another agent capable of directly influencing Nick’s thoughts and psyche by calling into being a procession of masculinities Nick readily adopts. Wholeness, inevitably, eludes Nick, and the varied perspective Bill offers, which I will explain soon, is directly tied to a loss of singularity for both the hero (Nick) and the collection itself. Stephen Clifford dispels both reader-imposed notions of certainty as well as the
wholeness of the characters around which singular narratives are constructed. Clifford points out in Beyond the Heroic “I”: Reading Lawrence, Hemingway, and “Masculinity”, “The narrative center does not hold because the social systems used to make moral meaning tend to be transparently artificial” (152). For Clifford, attempts at positioning a singular wholeness fall short because of the inability of any figure, Nick in this case, to hold together the ontological disruptions apparent in In Our Time. These disruptions fly in the face of stable constructions, which soon become obviously artificial. For Clifford, the basis of moral meaning becomes transparent because Hemingway refuses to allow the stories to settle into predictable narratives that offer a sense of completeness. As the collection moves towards “The Three-Day Blow,” a supposedly whole narrative breaks down, entering a realm where ontological perspectives cannot be definitively placed and uncertainty enters the world. Clifford’s reevaluation moves towards a recognition of what is in disarray, writing, “Of course, as a platonic ideal, the masculine Hemingway hero is an unachievable quantity, and to strive for such a goal is to attempt to obscure the uncontrollably messy and even cowardly aspects of one’s life—to eliminate the possibility that the individual himself is more monster than hero, more messy than ‘manly,’ more impotent than powerful” (144). In hopes of tidy conclusions, following the heroes of In Our Time proves futile since the characters constantly move towards messiness, engendered disorder, and precipitated ontological shock. Such a reading forecloses a sense that control and wholeness are available for Nick Adams, and a specific opening emerges in which the conversation between Nick and Bill develops as a means of disregarding commiseration in favor of disintegration. Since both loss and disarray are a part of Nick’s life by the time he arrives at Bill’s, “The Three-Day Blow” offers readers a guided progression through different masculinities in an effort
to construct a stable ontological experience on which Nick can base his life. Before looking at story itself, I would like to examine what it means to call into being masculinities, a reading based on Butlerian phenomenology. Judith Butler, in her post-structuralist expansion of performatives, calls into question the ways in which any sense of a gendered self is even conceived. In "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Butler discusses a constructed reality, writing, “Social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic social sign” (270). My reading hinges on the use of social signs that engender a constructed reality, and, as the means by which gender is constructed, the gestures of language need to be seen as what hints at social significance. Butler expands on this point, writing “if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative” (271). The belief in the performance is crucial, and, as Bill compounds masculinities on top of masculinities, the ways in which Nick truly embodies each one fosters the manifold, fleeting identities. For Nick, then, the assumption of a gender is whatever type of masculinity presented to him by Bill, but, like the ontological perspectives previously generated and denigrated, a singular masculinity is not part of Nick’s new reality. Or, as Butler puts it, “The ‘I’ that is its body is, of necessity a mode of embodying, and the ‘what’ that it embodies is possibilities” (272). Nick’s masculinity will remain single since it must embody the possibilities of perspectives that accompany the loss of innocence and singularity. In applying these initial concepts to “The Three-Day Blow,” we can understand what really happens when Nick talks over his past relationship with Bill on a windy September night. Since Nick’s singular narrative has already been opened to include differing ontological perspectives, it is not difficult to understand the ways in which Nick will slip into the
masculinities Bill calls into being in hopes of stabilizing his shifting perspectives. While the surface of Bill’s remarks attempt to bolster Nick’s male bravado, the key sentence from the title of this essay becomes the catalyst for looking at how Nick develops in response to Bill’s words and how Bill’s words refuse stability. The first instance in which Bill directs Nick towards what he will feel looks innocuous, but it is a telling moment of who will set in motion the many narratives that refuse wholeness. While the two are discussing the relative merits of Walpole and Chesterton, Nick is not certain of Walpole’s credentials as a classic author until Bill states, “’Walpole’s a classic, too,’” to which Nick readily agrees (43). With this simple statement and reaction by Nick, Bill commences a process of construction that quickly becomes the center of focus for the rest of the story, and, as the story progresses, the constructed feelings reflect continually increasing ontological stakes. Based on Nick’s ready adoption and internalization of new perspectives, the rest of the directive actions of Bill now appear wholly congruent with the ever-changing masculinities by which Nick’s psyche is literally called into being. From this moment on, Hemingway portrays Nick as a type of psychic sounding board for the ways in which Bill directs his life. When Nick says, “’I’m a little drunk now’” Bill rejects this idea out of hand, and Nick acquiesces (43). When Bill explains his dad’s theory on what makes a drunkard, Hemingway, in a direct statement concerning Nick’s inability to enact his own narrative, writes, “[Nick] had never thought of that before” (44). This is the first instance in which Nick actually changes his psyche because of the performance Bill calls into being for him. Nick’s previous ontological perspective was based on the idea that “it was solitary drinking that made drunkards” (44). With one quick move, Bill displaces one way of navigating through the world with another, more open interpretation of what it means to drink, whether alone or not, and still retain a level of
respectability. The way in which Nick interacts with the world has suddenly been ripped open to expose a new possibility previously unavailable. However, as is clear from Hemingway’s commentary, these possibilities for interacting with the world go beyond mere performance and actually become a part of Nick’s psyche. As a means of revealing how his mind ultimately responds to such impositions of manifold possibilities, we need to look at how a psyche could become susceptible to such vacillations of thought. In her essay, “The Unaccountable Subject: Judith Butler and the Social Conditions of Intersubjective Agency,” Kathy Dow Magnus explores the limits and possibilities of speech act theories. Her analysis of Butler also deals with what subjects can and cannot accomplish. Magnus rests her argument on some crucial implications outlined by Butler’s work by positing the idea of interior psychic space being inextricable from exterior determinants, which underscores the connection between subjectivity and social discourse. When talking about Nick, the social discourse enacted by other characters does, in fact, determine his subjectivity to the point that his psychic space becomes a reflection of the moment’s possibility. Or, as Magnus puts it, “Butler’s deconstruction of the traditional metaphysical subject leads her to propose a subject who comes into the play of language without any choice” (90). Nick is compelled to enter into the discourse and repeat the very speech acts presented in order to gain any sense of subjectivity, albeit an increasingly shattered subjectivity. No subjectivity escapes the effects of discourse, and, for Nick, the ways in which his agency is defined become bound to the discourses surrounding him. At this point, Nick has been completely stripped of the possibility of finalizing his narrative or his perspective, and the number of possibilities available become too much for the center—the character constructing Nick—to hold. In this fragmented, absent embodiment, Bill
calls into being varied masculinities, and, eventually, the possibilities proliferate beyond control. Once drunk, Bill impulsively calls into being a masculinity (happy bachelor) for Nick to embody, offering the idea that Nick is better off without Marjorie. At this point, the true point of Nick’s visit with Bill is finally brought to a point of interrogation. Suddenly, the idea of Marjorie enters their conversation as Bill says, “’You were very wise, Wemedge…To bust off that Marge business…It was the only thing to do. If you hadn’t, by now you’d be back home working trying to get enough money to get married’ (46). In response, Nick says nothing. Bill continues on with a diatribe against marriage with which Nick agrees. Then, Bill offers some disparaging remarks about Marjorie’s family, to which Nick nods assent. It is not enough for Bill to point out that Nick is better off without marriage, he has to mention how married men are “bitched” and develop a “fat married look” (46). By the time Nick has found the masculinity Bill has been painstakingly constructing, which is after Bill finally states, “’You came out of it damned well,’” Nick has wholly accepted this type of masculinity (47). Bill has actually just allowed Nick to embody and internalize the idea of the free bachelor by just putting it into words. Such constructed masculinities tell Nick to believe that he is better off without Marjorie, that all he needs is his friends, and that other, better choices for a relationship are certainly a part of his future. Nick is so convinced of the merits of the masculinity Bill has offered him it becomes part of Nick’s psychic space, and he lets it seep into his mind, at which point Nick finally utters, “’I couldn’t help it’” (47). The rules buy which Nick interacts with the world shift again. When he arrived, Nick was pained over the loss of his relationship and uncertain how he could interact with the world with his changed view. Bill has filled the loss with a temporary reprieve from mental anguish, but it is not enough, and Bill feels compelled to fill in his newlydeveloped masculinity with further definitions in hopes of clarifying his original stance.
Before looking at how Bill dismantles his most recent definition of masculinity, a consideration of why the need even arises will shed light on how the “The Three-Day Blow” concludes. The ways in which Nick moves from embodying one masculinity after another clearly points towards the discontinuous nature of masculinity, the multiple narratives inherent when masculinity is constructed. However, finality eludes Bill’s definitions because of an important aspect of the speech by which Nick’s masculinity is constructed: writing is never finished. In his study Plato, Derrida, and Writing, Jasper Neel distinguishes what it means to write for meaning, which only attempts closure through recognizing the gap in meaning engendered by writing itself. Writing for meaning is the active role a writer takes, within an inadequate system, in an attempt to cross the inherent gap that exists in language between the signifier (Nick) and any signified content (masculinities). Neel writes, Plato’s use of words, as opposed to what he says about them, reveals that words, rather than being describable things, are openings, gaps, or unfilled places waiting to be filled with (what else?) the other words that will always enter the empty space to fill it up, giving it a border, a content, a ‘meaning.’ Of course, this system works just so long as no one starts asking about the ‘other’ words that have filled up the emptiness of the word that came to be known by having its emptiness filled with words. (59). With directed circular logic, Neel points out that when authors start writing they inevitably open a space where real writing begins without conclusion. The gap can never close. In a way, then, writing for meaning can only offer movement, not closure; it only opens up a gap that must be filled with all the writing that must follow in the attempt to fulfill meaning. For Bill, when the attempt to define the masculinity Nick will become struggles to endure beyond its
initial moment, the definition and ensuing speech act is supported with an injection of even more definitions and speech acts in hopes of settling on one stable masculinity upon which Nick’s psyche can rest. Bill discovers, though, the impossibility of fulfillment, as one masculinity is supplemented by another, and so on, until the meaning proves hopeless, at which point Nick cannot hold together the perspectives constantly being added to his worldview. As “The Three-Day Blow” concludes, Bill is forced to intervene into his own definition of Nick’s masculinity because of the inherent instability of any center. Bill finally points out “’I talked about it and now I’m through. We won’t ever speak about it again. You don’t want to think about it. You might get back into it again’” (48). If we think about the point of Nick’s visit, it is not hard to believe that Bill is trying to cheer up his friend after a devastating relationship, but Bill seems to be aware of his own inability to define what happiness will actually entail. He must stop talking about it; he must stop thinking about it. By simply talking about it, the Marge business enters into a state of being continually unsettled, and, as Hemingway’s story unfolds, the supposedly full meanings continually break down. Or, as Arthur Bradley, in Derrida’s Of Grammatology, explains, “what produces the impression of any full or immanent presence is nothing less than the supplements that come to compensate for its absence” (103). The constructed happiness is not sufficient, as evinced by Bill’s constant rearticulation, and every moment of talking about it only leads to an inevitable supplementation, and every thought about Marjorie can never remain present. In fact, Bill’s very efforts to halt the proliferation of definitions has already failed as he calls into being successive perspectives of masculinity. In response to Bill’s new path to happiness, readers encounter the second iteration of Nick’s incomplete thoughts. Hemingway again writes, “Nick had never thought about that” (48).
The reader’s second encounter with this sentence should not come as much of a surprise, and it only demonstrates that Nick cannot hold onto any of the possible perspectives called into being. His ontological shock has become complete disintegration. The narrative possibilities have become manifest, and the constructions of a single narrative have eroded to the point that Nick moves towards a completely open psyche prone to infinitely more possibilities added during the process of definition. In How To Read Derrida, Penelope Deutscher explains that “every supposedly original state contains the possibility of its own loss in the form of its immanent degradation or substitution, replacement or supplementation” (41). Nick’s psychic states were never inviolable, and since they refuse any real presence, as Bill and Nick’s conversation aptly points out, degradation is the only course. As a result, Nick allows the possibilities to multiply at will. Bill’s final shift in masculinity calls into being the hopeless romantic that might sustain Nick. But it is definitely important to look at how Bill developed Nick’s masculinity from happy bachelor to brooding, hopeless romantic. Bill began his argument for busting off that Marge business by pointing out how Nick would get a certain married look. That definition, though, would not hold since that type of look is not only subjective but not absolute. Bill moves on to talking about how horrible in-laws can be until he realizes Nick needs to have his happiness directly explained and he delves into arguing that Nick and Marjorie were like oil and water, pointing out the unhappiness of the assumed incompatibility. Each moment in which Bill attempts to settle on why Nick can now be happy is interrupted by another definition of that happiness, which is interrupted by another definition. In a final effort to define happiness, Bill offers the idea that the relationship might not be over forever, which is just after Nick had finally believed it was all over, finished. Nothing
can remain stable, and everything is literally blown around to the point that, just as Nick begins to internalize a belief that he will get back into it, “The wind blew it out of his head” (49). Ontological shock manifests itself in the procession of Nick among differing points of psychic developments. From the start, Nick is unsure how to feel as he listens to Bill list the problems with being married and problems inherent in a relationship with Marjorie. Soon, though, Nick internalizes what proves to be a temporarily firm ontological perspective. Once Nick believes in Bill’s initial pronouncements, Hemingway points out that “It was all gone, finished” (47). Obviously, such ideas have been constructed for Nick’s psyche by Bill, but it is more important to understand that Nick’s attempts at positing his own ontological perspectives must disintegrate, as well. The problems arise when Bill continues with his definitions until certainty is irrevocably lost, and, right after “Nick had never though of that” Hemingway writes, “It had seemed so absolute” (48). What was supposed to be true is further stripped away to the point that absolutes cannot hold their meaning and must shift over time to encompass new meanings, new absolutes, and multiple perspectives. The moments of ontological shock Nick encountered earlier in his life allows for absolutes to become so misused, tossed aside when another perspective offers a more promising hope for true reconciliation. Once Nick’s absolute ontology gives way to fragmented perspectives, Hemingway’s final direct pronouncement of Nick’s ontological attitude (“Nothing was finished. Nothing was ever lost” (49)) demonstrates the impossibility of not only the definitions of masculinity but of absolutes, as well. The part of Nick’s psyche that should be immune to vacillation cannot remain stable. Since Nick’s ontological shock has reached a pivotal conclusion, and the ability of Bill to call into being a psychic reality for Nick is wholly undermined, broader insights are possible concerning why Hemingway chose to end “The Three-Day Blow” with these two similar
phrases: “The wind blew everything like that away” and “The wind blew it out of his head” (49). When this phrase is offered the first time, Hemingway is directing the antecedent of “it” towards “the Marge business” (49). By now, everything concerning Marge isn’t that important, which could be read as Nick’s ability to weather the storms that come along in life, but I believe instances like this are crucial to understanding how moments of sustained disintegration become a part of Nick’s life as he becomes older and finds himself confronted with the inability to sustain ontological truths. For Nick, the wind blew the Marge business out of his head because it became unable to remain very important, but when the two friends first started discussing Marjorie, the situation’s weight was felt by Nick as he listened in silence before agreeing with Bill’s assessment. Its waning importance is tied to the recognition of the sustained disintegration Bill opened up during their conversation about Marjorie, and the ability of the wind to blow those types of things out of his head hints at the impossibility of attempting to hold onto any ontological truths about the relationship. The same could be said concerning Nick’s life, as evinced by the second time the wind appears in the final four sentences. This time, the phrase appears right after “None of it was important now” (49). In this instance, Hemingway leaves the interpretation of “it” open so as to offer Nick a final encounter with ontological shock, which leaves Nick without anything on which he can construct a cohesive view of his reality. Nothing remains important, which is not to say that nothing is possible or that Nick is emotionally paralyzed; instead, nothing should be given significance since it will inevitably be reduced to ruins the moment of its voiced definition, a problem Bill has aptly demonstrated and Nick has readily internalized. In an effort to step back from the details I have been analyzing in “The Three-Day Blow," a look at how Nick’s psyche is developed throughout the story, and what it might say about his
past and future, should be considered. In addition, a wider observation of Nick’s psychic development will help explain the seemingly benign, but certainly obvious, ontological shock experienced in “The Three-Day Blow” and other stories. Not only are words themselves prone to infinite supplementation, so too is the individual psyche and its inability to complete its formation. Stepping back from the single definitions called into being and looking at Nick’s individual self-definition requires psychoanalytic approaches. Lacan’s dialectic offers a broader assessment of Nick’s failure to fully identity himself in relation to an other. First, we should look at who Nick’s other might actually be, and, for Lacan, the other remains an imaginary, longed-for ego-ideal. Lorenzo Chiesa offers some insight on with what the subject engages in Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. Chiesa writes, “the ego is a psychic agency caused in the subject by his alienating identification with a series of external images” (15). So, for Nick, the external images need to be considered, which entails a look at the ego-ideal by which Nick is measuring himself. The agency is the drive towards reconciling the alienation from the external images, but the images pushing Nick’s agency remain incomplete. Those images themselves have already been shown to be insufficiently present, prone to illusions of fulfillment that are undercut by perpetual supplementation. With this first step of developing Nick’s psyche, the initial alienation the subject experiences becomes even more drastic by the inability of the external images to remain stable. Efforts to explain this alienation even further inevitably leads to questioning the problem inherent in Nick’s agency as he attempts to move towards what he believes are stable identities. In Subjective Experience and the Logic of the Other, Romulo Lander offers a deeper understanding of what it means to engage in the activities of self-signification. He writes, “The subject is constituted through the effect of the signifier, yet, at the same time, he or she is the
cause of the signifier” (48). Lander’s paradox echoes Lacan who writes, “The signifier…makes manifest the subject of its signification, but it functions as a signifier only to reduce the subject in question to being no more than a signifier, to petrify the subject in the same movement in which it calls the subject to function, to speak, as subject. (207). For Hemingway’s character, then, we begin to see how the Nick creates his own instance of signifying his psychic state. If the external images proposed by Bill are discontinuous, then the signifiers based on these Nick constructs for himself will remain even further estranged from any ego-ideal. Remembering what Butler said, then, takes the signifier concept further by pointing out that the signifier itself can only embody possibilities, certainly an important aspect of Nick’s self-hood. Nick’s ontological shock has many agents influencing his inability to create a stable sense of self, and the external, specular images must be considered. The ongoing psychic dialectic by which Nick attempts to merge with the external images constructed for him is supposed to develop between the subject and an alienated unified self as the subject moves through life encountering more moments of mirror-stage experiences. This alone would allow for the perpetually fragmented self, but the specular image is not the dialectically constructed external image for Nick, and, instead, is the constructed identity posited by another psyche. As a result, Bill’s perpetually failing, constructed definition emerges as an artificial specular image by which Nick forever alienates himself, but Bill pieces together the specular image Nick finds himself pursuing. The dream of individual unity that would normally remain unattainable is distanced even further by the fact that it remains impossible for Bill himself to even construct a specular image that resists destabilizing deconstructions. The constant deconstruction Bill engages in only posits an external image of desire with which he finds himself unable to identify, but by which Nick chooses to direct his dialectic of the self. In the end, Hemingway, through
ontological shocks delivered by other characters in not just “The Three-Day Blow” but the preceding and following stories, shows the problems inherent in moving towards certainty with both single definitions and whole consciousnesses, and Nick’s constant process of being reconstructed based on the external impetuses of others becomes the only ontological truth remaining intact. Because of a complete inability of ontological truths to be sustained, ushering in a moment of perpetual disintegration, a new way of looking at the “The Three-Day Blow” comes to the forefront. Nick’s ultimate encounter with disruptions of definitions leads to a pivotal moment at which Hemingway posits a world that resists condensation and favors dispersion instead. The world in which Nick now lives is grounded in the dispersal of perspectives as new definitions constantly displace older ones, all of which points towards a different conception of the Cubist elements of In Our Time. Many critics have examined In Our Time looking for the Cubist elements, but a few recent critics have looked past the surfaces. In response to the wellestablished belief that Cubist elements pervade In Our Time3, Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, in “Hemingway’s In Our Time: A Cubist Anatomy” tackles the task of discerning the collection’s Cubist implications. Her essay discusses the self-conscious enactment of an anatomical study of the time through Cubist perspectives, explaining, of the collection as a whole, “There is no single authority, no single time, no single story, no single perspective—rather a simultaneous collage, if not collision, of interrelated forces at play in the text (and in reality, the text implies)” (36). Nick encounters this exact problem in various situations throughout his entire life, and “The ThreeDay Blow” becomes a perfect crystallization of the inherent problems with the collection’s treatment of simultaneity. Simultaneity eludes Nick and the other characters since the multiple perspectives generated by different characters collide causing more dispersion and deferring
coalescence. The perspectives offered in “The Three-Day Blow” hint at the ability to see everything at once, but, as I have shown, the instability of these visions causes simultaneity to be a problem. Brogan goes one to explains her view of the collection “as an anatomy specifically and self-consciously critiquing the multivarious and generically complicated structures that, in reality, have led to the horrible denouement of our actual ‘time’” (42). My analysis took great care is pointing out all the ways in which Nick’s perspective, and, of course, Hemingway’s writing, resist and dismantle singular narratives, and by tracing the uses of ontological shock, we can see the interrelated forces acting with a disregard for the will of the characters. By the end of “The Three-Day Blow,” Nick is certainly the object of complicated structures, and, as his agency is wholly removed by the end of the story, we find ourselves confronted with a story that obviously resists the urge to “fit perspective together to see the whole picture” (Brogan 41). What does the story offer? Lisa Narbeshuber, in “Hemingway’s In Our Time: Cubism, Conservation, and the Suspension of Identification,” offer an alternative reading grounded in suspended moments of crisis. She sees In Our Time as “interested in maintaining the moment of disintegration—in refusing to enter into modernity’s desire to totalize and dominate the world” (10). In the particulars of “The Three-Day Blow,” the desire to dominate is the desire to forge a presence that remains fulfilled, which it antithetical to what Bill actually accomplishes. Bill’s inability to construct with certainty is the reason why objects refuse availability, and the story’s impetus becomes a study in how Hemingway “attempts to sabotage the urge to dominate” (Narbeshuber 13). Not only do the multiple perspectives wholly resist the urge to dominate, but the created perspectives also hinder cultural knowledge from circulating among different characters,
removing the urge to dominate even further from the collection. Narbeshuber points out “The more Nick witnesses, the more Hemingway underscores a traumatic blockage of energy, knowledge, and perception” (15). While Narbeshuber is talking about “Indian Camp,” it would be foolish to limit such an analysis to just a few stories, and the complexity of “The Three-Day Blow” is often overlooked in this regard. Instead of Bill being the arbiter of meaning and Nick being the studious pupil, Bill’s ideals deconstruct themselves while he talks, and Nick’s psyche becomes more fragmented as the ontological shock initiated by the first story of the collection in which Nick appears begins to run rampant soon after Nick returns from war. For Nick, the struggle rests in the moments of sustained disintegration, moments during which the construction of meaning can be considered. In “The Three-Day Blow,” meaning slips away as the forces of the world further impinge on Nick’s ability to hold onto truths. Nick finds himself at an important part of his adult life when he walks over to Bill’s on a fall night. He has returned from the war wounded and soon finds himself ending a relationship about which he had high hopes. From an early age, Nick experienced ontological shocks that have sent him towards a quest to successfully construct meaning, but the situations in which he finds himself quickly devolve into perplexing moments of uncertainty he cannot sort through. By the time he and Bill talk about baseball, drinking, and that Marge business, the ontological shocks have reached a crescendo, and Hemingway’s shifting perspectives leave Nick without substantial ground on which to build any truths. Hemingway leaves Nick without recourse to past actions, which are wholly destabilized, and without any certainty for the future. As Nick moves through the rest of the collection, the search for meaning—a meaning too scattered and too multitudinous—will forever remain out of reach and, consequently, deferred.
Notes 1. Hurley notes the precise date of Thursday, September 28, 1916 to point out disenchantment, but not disillusionment with major league baseball. Losada contradicts Hurley, placing the date after the 1917 World Series (79-80), in order to point out how the type of setting, whether accurate or not, elucidates the emotion of the characters. 2. Many critics have noticed the analogy between the demise of the logging town and the defunct relationship between Marjorie and Nick. Flora (28-29) notes the suddenness of the demise and its evolution into a symbol for the rest of the story, one fraught with unintended consequences. Godfrey (51-52) equates the emotion of the setting to the human drama unfolding between Nick and Marjorie. 3. As early as 1925, critics noted the Cubist elements of In Our Time. Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn most recently notes the similar analytical tools of both Picasso and IOT. She writes, in relation to Krebs and the idea of simultaneity, “Certainly Hemingway’s use of the phrase ‘he liked’ in ‘Soldiers Home’ creates simultaneity within that story, where the repetition of the phrase and the differences and similarities between the repetitions reveal something about the essence of Krebs’s feelings that no individual instance of the phrase can” (6). The theme of multiplicity becoming a representation of essence is the basis of Vaughn’s reading.
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