The End of Something / Three-Day Blow – Analysis

In The End of Something, Nick clearly has something on his mind as he and Marjorie row across the still waters of the bay towards their favorite fishing ground. He doesn’t respond to Marge’s small-talk in the boat, and is quick to argue over small things when they reach the beach. He is either very nervous, or trying to build up the courage to tell her what is wrong.

Marjorie takes the news of the break-up calmly and rows off into the night. Her unemotional reaction is somewhat surprising, given there are suggestions that their relationship involved some level of intimacy: They sat on the blanket without touching each other…; “It isn’t fun anymore. Not any of it”…; “Isn’t love any fun?”. Perhaps this has happened to her before.

When Nick’s friend Bill comes out of the woods and asks if Marge created a scene, it is clear that he was not only aware of Nick’s decision but may have played a part in it.

Hemingway uses the weather to transition to the next story. The End of Something is set during a calm, still evening. The Three-Day Blow takes place a few days later during a raging wind storm. The wind reflects Nick’s inner turmoil about the break-up. Nick and Bill begin drinking heavily, and it soon becomes clear that Bill played a big part in Nick’s decision. He wants to make sure that the break-up is final, and after some awkward small-talk steers the conversation around to Marjorie. He gives Nick two reasons as to why relationship would not have worked. The first is that Marjorie is from a different race or social class to Nick:

If you’d have married her you would have had to marry the whole family. Remember her mother and that guy she married. Imagine having them around the house all the time and going to Sunday dinners at their house, and having them over to dinner and her (the mother) telling Marge all the time what to do and how to act.

You came out of it damned well. Now she can marry somebody of her own sort and settle down and be happy. You can’t mix oil and water and you can’t mix that sort of thing any more than if I’d marry Ida that works for Strattons.

Although Nick was the son of a doctor, there is no suggestion in these or any other Nick Adams stories that he is class conscious. Also, we know from other stories that Nick associated freely with Native American children when he was younger. We don’t know a lot about Bill’s background, but more than likely these comments are a reflection of Bill’s feelings and not Nick’s (Hemingway’s). This is especially so as we are told that Nick sat quietly and said nothing as Bill made these comments.

Bill’s second and more telling reason was a selfish one: marrying would change Nick in some way.

Once a man’s married he’s absolutely bitched. He hasn’t got anything more. Nothing. Not a damn thing. He’s done for. You’ve seen the guys that get married. You can tell them. They get this sort of fat married look. They’re done for.

Bill is thinking only of himself when he says this. He is afraid of what his life would be like if he did not have Nick to hang out and go fishing with, and fails to realize how deeply Nick cares for Marjorie. Inadvertently, Bill says something that causes Nick to brighten up:

We won’t ever speak about it again. You don’t want to think about it. You might get back into it again.

Nick realizes that, if he wishes, there may still be a chance for him to re-kindle the relationship. The story ends on an uplifting note as they step outside to go hunting and the wind again plays a role:

None of it was important now. The wind blew it out of his head. Still he could always go into town Saturday night. It was a good thing to have in reserve.

*  *  *  *  *

Hemingway expanded on what would have been Bill’s concerns in On Writing, a story fragment which the editor apparently cut from the end of another Nick Adams story, Big Two-Hearted River. By that time Nick had married another woman (Helen). Hemingway wrote:

When he (Nick) married he lost Bill, Odgar, the Ghee, all the old gang. Was it because they were virgins? The Ghee certainly was not. No, he lost them because he admitted by marrying that something was more important than the fishing.

He had built it all up. Bill had never fished before they met. Everyplace they had been together. The Black, the Sturgeon, the Pine Barrens, the Upper Minnie, all the little streams. Most about fishing he and Bill had discovered together. They worked on the farm and fished and took long trips in the woods from June to October. Bill always quit his job every spring. So did he.

Bill forgave him the fishing he had done before they met. It was like a girl about other girls, if they were before they did not matter. But after was different.

That was why he lost them, he guessed. They were all married to fishing. He’d been married to it before he married. Really married to it. It wasn’t any joke. So he lost them all.

The irony of all this is that Marjorie loved fishing. She is probably one of the few women who, if they had stayed together and got married, would not have wanted Nick to stop fishing with his friends.