Introduction
The story “Cross Country Snow” depicts themes of a male bound and male friendship typical for many Hemingway’s stories. The main character of the story, Nick, is at a loss about the prospect of his spouse’s pregnancy. Hemingway depicts many themes and motifs metaphorically giving readers a chance to interpret the meaning and significance of male friendship, love and human relations in general. Thesis The story Cross Country Snow vividly portrays a theme of male friendship and a strong bound confronted with Nick’s fear of fatherhood and possible changes in his life.
Main text
The story opens with the description of two friends, Nick and George, ski out. At the beginning of the story, Hemingway describes the icy winter beauty: he writes specifically and beautifully about the world and nature (Meyers 23). The evocative intimacy of place well-remembered marks this, and many other of Hemingway’s descriptions of that boyhood world.
“Nick Adams came up past George, big back and blond head still faintly snowy, then his skis started slipping at the edge and he swooped down, hissing in the crystalline powder snow and seeming to float up and down as he went up and down the billowing khuds” (Hemingway 45).
This description creates an atmosphere of solemnity and beauty. Hemingway depicts a rivalry between the characters and their desire to ‘do their best’. The hesitancy and repetition of phrases, the parallels of contrast, express and enforce the strong bound between George and Nick. Hemingway underlines that both men enjoy physical activity but do not want to talk much about it.
In contrast to a male bound and friendship, Hemingway depicts relations between Nick and Helen, and Helen’s pregnancy. “Though he is not yet ready to be a father, Nick shows that accepting responsibility for his actions will enable him to move forward. The opposition in the opening paragraph illustrates Nick’s conflict” (Edenfield 142). It is possible to say that Nick Adams striving rigorously to forget the vocational implications of his spouses’ pregnancy and instead dwell on skiing, metaphor for writing without such implications, with his friend George, Nick’s alter ego or the writer’s internalized private audience in writing: “George and Nick were happy.
They were fond of each other. They knew they had the run back home ahead of them” (Hemingway 47). The thought of his social obligation raised by his wife’s pregnancy constantly intrudes: in the ski lodge, “Nick noticed that [the waitress’s] apron covered swellingly her pregnancy” (Hemingway 47) Except as fantasy, this surrogate writer’s ideal scene of writing as pure play remains just that, a fiction of writing fiction free from public determinations.
Nick gives an affirmative answer to George’s question, “‘don’t you wish we could just bum together? Take our skis and go on the train to where there was good running…and not give a damn about school or anything’?” but then can’t promise George that they will ever “‘go skiing again’” together’ (Hemingway 48). The repetition of key words and phrases and the circularity of issues has a predictability.
As a part of the collection In Our Time, ‘Cross Country Snow’ can be seen as an in-depth description of male friendship and male activities. This story explores male authority in ways that seriously question its nature and value. Physical activities and function as legitimating agents for men’s images of themselves. “The moment together over the wine and cake is important in revealing how close Nick and George have been.
The scene sets up what Nick is losing in taking on a family” (Edenfield 141). Similar to other stories, ‘Cross Country Snow’ depicts a difference between male and female relations. The themes of love and friendship inform readers in such subtle ways that they are easily overlooked even though they are the forces which motivate the characters’ behavior. In the case of George and Nick they form the basis of their relationship. Too often this relationship is laid waste by stereotypical thinking.
The main theme of male relations and friendship reflects inner feelings and the atmosphere of trust. The contract between male and female relations explains the responsibility towards a male friend and friendship. There is a mystery at the heart of such freedom and responsibility as there is a discontinuity between the main characters and the rest of the natural world. This discontinuity is evident in the new possibilities for narrative.
Hemingway writes: “They took down their skis from where they leaned against the wall of the inn. George was already started up the road, his skis on his shoulder. Now they would have run home together” (Hemingway 52). This scene shows that in spite of all troubles and problems faced by both men, they try to keep their friendship and support each other. Causes must now contend with reasons as the narrative possibilities for the human condition become multiple and diverse. Such an understanding of interpretation vitiates Nick’s insight that male friendship is the central instance of the human.
It is possible to say that Nick regards skiing as an escape from the world and its problems. George asks Nick: “Will you go back to the States? ’Nick answers: I guess so.’” (Hemingway 50), and adds that he does not want to go there. The relationship between Nick and George are based on personal intimacy, especially between vocational peers (Pfeiffer and Konig 97). In spite of the sparse details of plot, the subtle and dramatic dialogue “reveals a clear, sensitive portrait of two strong personalities of Nick and George. Hemingway uses few words in dialogues and shows as real men Nick and George speak in direct sentences, effectively translate the world and achieve their goals, and are therefore traditionally masculine. The impersonal tone of this narration is a highly personal glimpse into the narrator.
The language is simple enough, but in the word repetitions, in the pacing of the phrases, the contrast of the long and short sentences, the writer deliberately appeals to the senses, both to what is seen and how it sounds to the ear.
Conclusion
In sum, Cross Country Snow vividly portrays close relations between two men and the role and importance of male friendship. In this story, Hemingway recognizes subjectivity and creative potential of traditional gender-inked patterns, and uses imaginative power to define and shape what has always been defined as objective reality. Make friendship, and a strong bound between Nick and George, is confined with Helen’s pregnancy and Nick’s fears to become a father. The psychological configuration of the story, considered amid an array of contrapuntal image patterns, imparts a symbolic equivalence between the male friendship and the theme of fatherhood. Male friendship allows Nick to escape from problems and underline his ego and masculine wilderness.
Works Cited Page
Edenfield, C. O. Doomed Biologically: Sex and Entrapment in Ernest Hemingway’s “Cross-Country Snow”. The Hemingway Review 19 (1999), 141.
Hemingway, E. In Out Time. Scribner, 1996.
Meyers, J. Ernest Hemingway: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 1997.
Pfeiffer, G., Konig, M. “The Bill Always Came”: Hemingway’s Use of the Epiphany in “Cross-Country Snow. The Hemingway Review 16 (1996), 97.