Style & Tone in Hemingway's Story The Battler

Nick Adams, the character who stands in for Ernest Hemingway in a series of short stories, encounters harsh reality in "The Battler." Likely, Hemingway wanted the story to serve as a cautionary tale for those who would try to fight the world, for according to the story the world will always win. Hemingway achieves his purpose in this story by presenting action without external narration or explanation, allowing the events in effect to present themselves and allowing the reader to discover the meaning of these events on his or her own. This process begins with the first lines and continues throughout the story:

Nick stood up. He was all right. He looked up the track at the lights of the caboose going out of sight around the curve. There was water on both sides of the track, then tamarack swamp (Hemingway 129).

In keeping with the title, the story has a contentious tone carried by Hemingway's succinct syntax and concrete semantics. The theme expresses a view of the mythic journey through life in which the young man learns about life and forms his character on that basis.

The opening lines of the story set the scene in an indirect way that creates suspense. The author does not explain the action directly but brings the reader into the action in the middle of things, after an important action and before the story proper begins so that the reader has to connect the events before the opening lines with those that follow. The opening lines

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o point to that character as a sort of advertisement for what could happen to Nick if he follows the same path and allows his anger to guide him in fighting the world. Bugs is Ad's friend and represents what Ad has become--a crazy person--while himself standing for someone willing to be called Bugs so he can remain near his friend and care for him. These two men serve as examples to the young man, and the short time he spends with them becomes for him a lesson for his own behavior and his own future. The characterizations in the story emerge from the interplay of each character with others. Nick appears as the young man foolish enough to get himself thrown off a train--it has been noted how Nick falls for the ploy used by the brakeman, who then tosses the young man unceremoniously from the train. Nick becomes the stranger who literally drops into the scene. His characterization is achieved in the opening lines as he dusts himself off, complains to himself about his ill-treatment, and determines to do something about it at a later date. Ad seems to be a mild-mannered man when Nick first meets him, but he changes rather abruptly and with very little reason when Nick refuses to give him his knife, at the request of Bugs. Ad d

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