When Nick finally makes it to the river—after hiking away from the abandoned town of Seney—he pauses to take in the view. The narrator uses a simile at this point to describe the evidence of fish in the water:
While Nick walked through the little stretch of meadow alongside the stream, trout had jumped high out of water. Now as he looked down the river, the insects must be settling on the surface, for the trout were feeding steadily all down the stream. As far down the long stretch as he could see, the trout were rising, making circles all down the surface of the water, as though it were starting to rain.
The simile here—in which the narrator describes how the trout were “making circles” on the surface of the river “as though it were starting to rain”—captures the simple beauty of this moment for Nick. While Seney was a burned-down town with no sign of life (reminiscent of the war zone that Nick has recently left), the river is teeming with so much life that it looks as though it is raining. This first interaction with the river hints at the soothing effect it will have on Nick over the rest of the story, as well as the comforting effect nature has on Nick in general.
When Nick is collecting grasshoppers to use as fishing bait, he pauses to notice the ways that the grasshoppers move and relate to each other. The narrator captures Nick’s reflections on the grasshoppers using a metaphor and a simile:
Nick picked them up, taking only the medium-sized brown ones, and put them into the bottle. He turned over a log and just under the shelter of the edge were several hundred hoppers. It was a grasshopper lodging house. Nick put about fifty of the medium browns into the bottle. While he was picking up the hoppers the others warmed in the sun and commenced to hop away. They flew when they hopped. At first they made one flight and stayed stiff when they landed, as though they were dead.
The metaphor in this passage—that the log Nick turned over was “a grasshopper lodging house”—communicates the sheer number of grasshoppers that he finds in that one location. The simile—that the grasshoppers stiffened when they landed inside of his bottle “as though they were dead”—brings readers closer to the scene, helping them picture the dramatic nature of the grasshoppers’ movements.
Hemingway’s use of playful figurative language here is notable because it’s one of the few times that such language appears in the story. It is clear that, while witnessing the grasshoppers’ silly antics, Nick feels joyful and unburdened. While many things remind him of his painful war service, these simple creatures allow him to almost re-enter a childlike state. Easy moments in nature like this are clearly healing for traumatized Nick.
