Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Andrea M. Edwards
English 582- Rhetoric and Poetics
Kraemer, Dr. Donald
7 June 2012
Revised: Fall 2015
Now I Lay Me- Hemingway and Narrative
In Ernest Hemingways short story Now I Lay Me, Nick Adams is reminiscing about a
time when he had insomnia, having nightmares caused by the war he served in where he could
have died at anytime, so instead decides to reminisce on his childhood, converses with his
orderly about marriage, by the end the story moves to his orderly visiting him in the hospital
months later, and being disappointed when he sees Nick has not gotten married. His orderly,
John, who is married and has three daughters (Hemingway 369), uses some of Phelans idea of
redundant storytelling, Explanations that seek to preserve the mimetic component of the story
plausible, naturalistic rationale for the narration (25). John does this by constantly saying to
Nick that he should get married (Hemingway 369-70). Phelan would say this narration is actually
more of a lyric narrative (30) or to explain in more detail:
To clarify that claim, I turn now to more general descriptions of what
marks a given text narrative, what marks another as lyric, and what marks a third
text as a character portrait; these descriptions are all based on the rhetorical
definition of narrative I referred to in the introduction: somebody telling
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somebody else on some occasion for some purpose that something happened
(161).
I believe that his theory on redundant or repetitious storytelling is more precise than his theory
on it being a lyric narrative. Although it seems as though it would be classified as a lyric
narrative because of this:
I begin with Now I Lay Me, paying attention to the logic of its
progression, its movement from Nick the tellers memories of how he used to stay
awake during the war by remembering his past to his memory of a conversation
on the specific night to his present situation (Phelan 163).
I would argue that Phelan is using his theory of repetitious
storytelling and lyric narrative to describe the narrative
devices used for Now I Lay Me.
Hemingway projects himself through his character Nick
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what the reader learns is Nick is the crusading protagonist of this story, and this is his story to
tell. Phelan states:
Hemingways disclosure exceeds Nicks narration because Hemingway,
unlike Nick, has constructed logic behind the twist and turns of Nicks
monologue. Indeed, this move on Hemingways part is crucial to our responding
to the story as a lyric narrative because it
Aside from the lyric narrative which
is presented in this story, the lyric
narrative can be linked to memory,
and in this case, possibly artificial
memory in the sense that
Hemingway wants the reader to
remember Nick and his story by
repetition presented throughout the
story; although the audience does
not know if what Nick is
remembering is real, or if it may
have somehow been altered in some
form to allow or prevent Nick from
remembering certain areas of his
past.
repetitive storytelling. Hemingway encourages readers to create their own explanations of Nicks
overall character or actions to prevent readers from considering Nick as an undisputed
representation of Hemingway, but to say there is a distance between Hemingway and his
character, Nick, is to say Hemingway has little similarities or relationship to Nick, when in
reality Nick is similar to Hemingway because he is a reflection of what Hemingway had gone
through during his time in two World Wars and the Spanish Civil War (Hemingway 501).
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Nick Adams may or may not be a reliable narrator because of his memories, his second
name, and his insomnia and because of dialogue such as this:
Cant you sleep, Signor Tenente? he asked.
No.
I cant sleep, either.
Whats the matter?
I dont know. I cant sleep (Hemingway
367).
Nick does not call himself Nick, and for reasons the
reader is not given he is going by the name of Signor
Tenente, so this change in his name is the first sign of his
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category especially if it is fear brought on by being in a war situation, Say, Signor Tenente, what
did you get in this war for, anyway? (Hemingway 369). Phelan states Nick the teller is in much
the same psychological state as Nick the soldier. Although he may no longer worry that his soul
will go out of his body if he falls asleep, Nick is still living with deep wounds that disturbs his
nights (165). Phelan seems to contradict himself when he states Nick does not have insomnia
because of the definition I have given states he does.
The issue of Nicks memories and his out-of-body experience are mentioned in this story,
Nick's soul did once leave him, but returned, as he was wounded in Now I Lay Me (276)
(Hannum 94). Nick does state on page 363, I myself did not want to sleep because I had been
living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself
go, my soul would go out of my body. I believe this could have been an idea his parents or
someone in his life may have placed into his head as a child, or he has been awake for so long he
is becoming delusional, or he is so frightened by what could happen because of the war he is in
he convinces himself to believe that if he goes to sleep his soul will leave his body. Another critic
states, Nick in Now I Lay Me even explains how he does it, as well as recalling for us which
day-dreams work and which dont in relieving his anxiety (Benson 351), his day-dreams are his
memories of his childhood (Hemingway 364-6), and he uses these memories to ease his fear, but
these memories do not help him in easing his fear or anxiety. This goes back to his credibility as
a narrator because according to Phelan, despite his retrospective stance, Nick has not fully
formulated the story he is about to tell; indeed, he is less focused on the narrative than on
feelings that motivate his memories (166). Nick could count as a credible narrator because he
did not have time to recount the story he is telling. He is just simply telling his story as it unfolds
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and as he remembers it. The implied author wants us to believe this is what Nick remembers and
this is his story as he remembers it.
Now I Lay Me is based on the prayer Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, and prayer is
actually mentioned a few times in this story. There is the Hail Mary and the Our Father on
page 365, and On earth as it is in heaven which is part of the Our Father, or the Lords
Prayer on page 366, and the irony of this is as he is praying, he does not want his soul to leave
his body (Hemingway 363), and the title of the story is
Now I Lay Me which is part of the prayer Now I Lay
Me Down to Sleep. Monteiro mentions this little factoid
in his article, And indeed they must in Hemingway's
peopled world, from the rattled Nick Adams of Now I
Lay Me (with its ironic titular reference to still another
prayer) to the author who himself compulsively parodied
the Twenty-Third Psalm in the late 1920s, both in his
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they never know if they are going to wake up. This had to have been the case for Nick because if
he had gone to sleep, then he might have died in his sleep. Phelan claims, Nick also shifts away
from the memory of people and things to the memory of his praying for them, and to the
effectiveness of the prayers in passing the time. At the same time, the specific prayers, Hail
Mary and Our Father, are easily associated with images of Nicks parents (170), and I
believe that Phelan is correct in saying that his prayers for other people are associated with his
parents, but I do genuinely believe that he is also praying to keep himself awake and to pray for
safety of others and maybe even himself. (Also, in the
Catholic Church, Mary is seen as the mother of
humanity or of the church, and God is seen as the father,
so this can easily represent Nicks parents in a literal or
metaphorical sense because the audience is not aware of
who Nicks parents are.) This will also tie into his
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because he is afraid of what will happen to his soul if he does (Hemingway 363-71). Jeffrey
Meyers uses a passage out of Now I Lay Me in which Nick describes his first memory in order
to describe the author's earliest memory (Benson 346). Nick Adamss memory is important
because it determines whether or not he is a reliable narrator, it determines the scope of the story,
it determines the overall narration of the story and it determines what he will choose to tell the
reader.
There are the emotional and psychological aspects of this story as well. Nick emotional
and psychological states can be linked his fears, memories and nostalgia, Mutability, loss and
the fear of loss, longing, nostalgia, hunger; lost love, lost illusions, and finally lost youth and
the people, places, and experiences of youth: there are the basic themes and motives and
situations of Hemingway's fiction, and they are almost always more essential than violence and
death (Adair 299). Nick is in an anxiety heavy state and he will do anything to keep his cool
under pressure, The value of discipline is also linked to the most famous of Hemingways
values, couragealso frequently called grace under pressure (Phelan 180). Phelan also mentions
that, Nick the teller is in much the same psychological state as Nick the solider. At some point
in the story, he no longer worries about his soul leaving his body if he falls asleep, Nick is still
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living with deep wounds that disturbs his nights (Phelan 164-5). Nick psychological state is
centered on insomnia, and he does whatever he can to keep himself awake, Positing
physiological foci for his protagonists' problems could seem happenstance until one considers
the scope of the device in Hemingway's writing: Lieutenant Nick Adams trying to ignore his
nighttime war fears (Now I Lay Me, 1927) while the silkworms chew the leaves as relentlessly
as the enemy might chew on him and his comrades (Raabe 162). Nick listens to silkworms
chew leaves, he prays, he thinks about his past, he goes back to praying, and then he starts up a
conversation with John, his orderly to keep himself from falling asleep, but what he fails to
realize is by doing all of this it makes it harder for him to ever go back to sleep.
The narration of Now I Lay Me is problematic for many critics because some of them
believe that it is not scrutinized or criticized enough, The tension between those impulses and
the criticism that Hemingway himself subjects them to is most subtly, and perhaps most
profoundly, expressed in Now I Lay Me, a work that has not received adequate critical scrutiny,
though it is often referred to by students of Hemingway (Holder 156). Although, Phelan might
disagree with this because he believes the narrative is criticized, Now I Lay Me remains for
me one of the most powerful and most disconcerting of Hemingways brilliant corpus of short
stories, (Phelan 182). I am going to agree with Phelan on this because this is one of
Hemingways better short stories, and I say this because the narrative is engaging and it is one of
those stories where the reader has to figure out what is happening in the narrative, and what lead
Nick Adams to this point. The narration becomes more problematic because of the dialogue
between Nick and John that leads me to believe this is redundant storytelling and not just lyric
narrative. The dialogue between Nick and John also gives insight as to why Now I Lay Me is
different than many of the other stories Hemingway has written in the past, Now I Lay Me,
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also narrated by a young American in the Italian army who has also been wounded and who also
has a conversation about marriage. But whereas in the first story the narrator wants to marry and
is warned not to, in the second the narrator, who seems unwilling to marry, is advised to do so by
his orderly, John (Smith 175). The narrative is clear on
I felt it necessary to address this
narrative because it became clear to
me this was a recurring pattern in
Hemingways short stories.
Hemingway loves to use repetitive
storytelling because he knows his
audience will remember the story if
it is told in this manner.
You ought to get married. Why dont you pick out some nice Italian girl
with plenty of money? You could get any one you want. Youre young and you
got good decorations and you look nice. You been wounded a couple of times.
I cant talk the language well enough.
You talk it fine. To hell with talking the language. You dont have to talk
to them. Marry them.
Hemingway makes it clear who is who in this story and who says what in this story, so that the
reader is not playing a complete guessing game with the dialogue, although, as the readers can
see, John is repeating himself quite a few times when it comes to marriage, which is why this
short story can easily be viewed as a repetitive story and a lyric narrative because these devices
are displayed within the story.
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Clark, Miriam Marty. Hemingway's Early Illness Narratives and the Lyric Dimensions of Now
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Monteiro, George. Ernest Hemingway, Psalmist. Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 14, No. 1
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