ibed as being on a journey, for any life can be compared to a journey, but for Lily the journey takes her in a downward spiral as she sees her hopes dashed and reaches the conclusion that only by killing herself can she escape from the dilemma into which her own actions and society's beliefs have placed her. This is also a world of fragility, especially for women, and a woman can find herself on the outside of the social scene for the most innocent of reasons.
It is not marriage itself that is the destructive force in this novel but the way marriage is used by people of a certain social class, and also by those who want to be part of that social class. Marriage is a business proposition, a tool for advancement, a means to acquire security, and an agreement whereby each party gets what they want so long as they do not require love. Lily is not an admirable character, but she only reflects the attitudes of her time. Gerty and Lawrence Farish are friends who try to help Lily but who cannot make her see any possibilities other than those of which she has dreamed.
Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990.
The character of Nick Adams stands in for the author, Ernest Hemingway, in a number of ways in the stories in In Our Time, a book which presents Nick as himself both character and author, since it is assumed that some of the stories are to be considered as if they had been written by him. The war is a theme in In Our Time, and many feel that the character of Nick Adams, seen in several of the stories in this volume, is a reflection of Hemingway himself as a young man. Nick Adams is a young man who travels a good deal, as did Hemingway, and their war experiences are similar up to a point.
In the stories and the vignettes between stories, the brutality of the war is often contrasted
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