“Big Two-Hearted River” is set in the town of Seney, Michigan—and the surrounding area—in the years following World War I. Though Hemingway does not establish why the protagonist Nick takes the train to Seney (or where he’s taking it from), it is clear that this is a town he knows well, a place where he lived (or at least frequently visited) before he served overseas. The narrator captures Nick’s relationship to the town in the following passage near the beginning of the story:
Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log spiles of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.
This passage establishes some important qualities about the setting of the story. First, the familiar town Nick thought he would find has changed drastically due to a fire. He “had expected to find the scattered houses of the town” and instead found a “burned-over stretch of hillside.” While the town has changed, the river, Nick finds, has not—despite the trauma to the town, the river still “swirled against the log spiles of the bridge” and was full of trout (the only sign of life). This is one of the first moments in the story when nature’s consistency consoles Nick in the face of so much destruction and change.
Though Hemingway never directly addresses Nick’s status as a war veteran, Nick’s reflections on his friend Hopkins (who received “the telegram,” left home, and never returned) makes it clear that he and his friends belong to the generation of young men who were drafted to the war effort. In this way, “Big Two-Hearted River” is a subtle reflection on the impacts of the war. Nick’s emotional highs and lows over the course of the story communicate that he is still processing the trauma and loss he experienced as a soldier.
