“Big Two-Hearted River” opens with an example of situational irony. While Nick intentionally takes a train to the town of Seney in order to return to a familiar and comforting place, he finds the opposite—a town that has been completely decimated, with no signs of life. It becomes clear over the course of the story that Nick has been searching for a place that doesn’t remind him of his time serving in World War I and yet, because of the fire, Seney resembles a town that has been bombed.
The irony of Nick’s situation comes across in the opening lines of the story:
The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber. Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding the baggage man had pitched out of the door of the baggage car. There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country. The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground […] It was all that was left of the town of Seney.
The descriptions here make it clear that Nick knows this town well—he remembers that there were 13 saloons lining the main street and knows the name of the hotel. The narrator also notes that he arrived on a train, meaning that he went out of his way to get there.
Though Hemingway’s minimalist prose is not particularly emotional here, the fact that Nick immediately sits down on his luggage after exiting the train suggests that he is stunned by the state of the town—this is clearly not what he expected. This ironic twist establishes from the start of the story that one of Nick’s struggles is accepting the inevitability of change. He ultimately decides to immediately head out of town and into nature, a force that he finds soothing for its consistency and predictability—even if the town has been burned down, the river and hills are still there to welcome him home.
