INRODUCTION
“Fathers and Sons” by Ernest Hemingway is a reflective short story about Nick Adams driving through his hometown with his son and recalling his relationship with his father, especially the lessons he learned about hunting and shooting. The story explores the complex emotions of love and tension between generations, highlighting the passage of values and the challenges in father-son bonds.
“Fathers and Sons” was first published in 1933 in Winner Take Nothing and later included in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories and The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. The title may draw on Ivan Turgenev’s mid-19th-century novel Fathers and Sons.
The character Nicholas Adams, partly based on Hemingway’s own life, appears as the protagonist in about two dozen short stories and vignettes Hemingway wrote in the 1920s and 1930s. The first Nick Adams story, “Indian Camp,” appeared in In Our Time (1925). After Hemingway’s death, editors collected all Nick Adams stories in The Nick Adams Stories (1972), which trace a young man’s journey of growth and self-discovery through different stages of life.
THE STORY
Paragraph 1: The story opens by introducing the main character, Nicholas Adams, who drives a car through an empty town on a Sunday, when traffic is light. The town is vividly described, with brick-paved streets and heavy trees that block out the sun. The road he is travelling on leads to a highway lined with timber on both sides. This place is Nick’s father’s hometown. The setting is mid-autumn, making the countryside beautiful and perfect for riding a motorcycle. As Nick drives, his son is asleep beside him. Nick stops at each clearing to watch cornfields, houses, thickets, a covey of birds in flight, etc.
Paragraph 2: Nick’s thoughts turn to hunting quail, and he vividly describes how one hunts them. Thinking about hunting reminds him of his father, who had taught him how to hunt in the countryside. The first thing that comes to mind when he thinks of his father is his eyes. His father was a big man with wide shoulders, a hooked hawk-like nose, a beard, and quick movements. However, his most remarkable feature was his eyes, his greatest gift; they could see farther and faster than ordinary human eyes.
Paragraph 3: Nick then recalls the shooting lessons his father gave him. His father’s sharp eyesight let him notice small details in the background that young Nick could never spot. Despite his keen eyesight, his father was very nervous and sentimental. His sentimentality made him both cruel and abused. Nick reflects that his father experienced a great deal of bad luck in life, some of which was not even his own fault. His father died in a trap, one set by people who betrayed him. Nick believes that sentimental people are often betrayed. Nick has not yet written about his father, suggesting he is a writer. He is grateful to his father for teaching him two skills: fishing and shooting. However, his father was unsound regarding matters of sex. Nick is 38, and he still enjoys fishing and shooting.
Paragraph 4: Nick remembers two specific lessons his father gave him about sex. The first incident happened while they were out shooting, when Nick shot a red squirrel that had bitten his thumb. Annoyed, Nick called it a “dirty little bugger.” His father corrected him, explaining that a bugger is a man who has sex with animals, a heinous crime. Nick was surprised and horrified. The second lesson was when Nick read a newspaper story about the famous musician Enrico Caruso being arrested for “mashing.” Not knowing what mashing meant, Nick asked his father, who told him it was one of the worst crimes, though it was slang for flirting. Nick imagined bizarre scenarios involving mashing and decided that when he was old enough, he wanted to try it at least once.
Paragraph 5: Nick’s father also warned him that masturbation would lead to blindness, insanity, death, etc. He advised Nick to avoid prostitutes because men who visited them would contract terrible venereal diseases. Although Nick loved his father’s fantastic eyes, he disliked many things about him. Nick wanted to write about these dislikes to rid himself of them, but felt it was too soon because too many people were still alive, except for his father. Nick remembers the day of his father’s death and how handsome the undertaker had made his father look.
Paragraph 6: Nick recalls his experiences at Hemlock Wood behind the Indian Camp, where his sexual experiences began. He describes the trail to the Indian Camp in vivid detail.
Paragraph 7: Nick further describes the creek and the surrounding woods in sensory detail.
Paragraph 8: Nick introduces three people from the Indian Camp: Billy, Trudy, and Eddie. Billy is Trudy’s brother, and Eddie is their half-brother. Nick is annoyed to hear that Eddie wishes to sleep with his sister Dorothy. Nick enjoys being physically intimate with Trudy when Billy is away.
Paragraph 9: Back in the present, Nick rides along the highway as darkness falls. For the first time, the end of the day reminds him of his father, because that time of day used to be his alone. Many things remind Nick of his father: the fall season, early spring when jackrabbits are on the prairie, bundles of corn, lakes, horses and buggies, sounds of wild geese, duck blinds, eagles striking canvas decoys, deserted orchards, newly ploughed fields, thickets, small hills, and walking through dead grass. Nick notes that after the age of fifteen, he never shared anything with his father.
Paragraph 10: Nick recalls more about his father, describing his frost-filled beard in winter and his sweatiness in summer. His father loved to work in the sun and preferred manual labour, which Nick disliked. Though Nick loved his father, he hated his smell. A memory comes back of Nick being asked to wear his father’s used underwear, which was too small and made him sick. He threw it into a creek and lied about losing it, for which he was whipped.
Paragraph 11: Nick reveals that he loved only the smell of one of his sisters and avoided all other smells. His sense of smell faded after he started smoking. His son wakes up and asks about Nick’s experiences with the Indians, and Nick replies that they were the Ojibway. Nick remembers his sexual experiences with Trudy and his hunting lessons involving the three bullets his father gave him every day. The boy hardly remembers his grandfather, but he asks many questions about him, recalling that his grandfather gave him an air rifle and an American flag when he visited from France. Nick tells his son that his father was a great hunter and angler and had wonderful eyes. The boy wants to pray at his grandfather’s tomb in France. Nick promises to take him there soon.
Ernest Hemingway’s “Fathers and Sons” is an apt example of the classic “Hemingway Style.” It is the final story Hemingway wrote about his semi-autobiographical protagonist, Nick Adams. The story reflects aspects of Hemingway’s own life, particularly his father’s suicide, centring on Nick’s ambivalent feelings toward his father. In Nick’s reflections, layers of admiration, regret, guilt, hatred, love, etc. are directed toward the memory of his father.
As Nick travels back to his father’s country, the past overtakes him, and, like his father, it neither completely dies nor truly sustains him. The darkness surrounding Nick is described as deep and impenetrable, the “dark murk of the swamp.” The story begins with a detour not taken, symbolising a journey driven by the protagonist’s inner motives rather than external circumstances. His entrance into the town signifies an inward journey into his own mind and emotions.
The narrative shifts between memory and darkness, yet it also shows how remembrance can bring clarity and understanding. Nick reaches the core of his past, symbolically recovering old experiences and suggesting that while he is not living in the past, it still lives within him. The story becomes a mental journey through layers of consciousness. The landscape of Northern Michigan, heavy with memories, mirrors Nick’s psychological terrain. He tries to distance himself from his youth and his father’s memory, but, paradoxically, he is constantly drawn back to them.
There are two Nicks and two kinds of pasts—the spoiled past and the nourishing past. The story’s contrasting imagery, such as dark, burnt, and sharp versus clear, green, and light, emphasises this duality. Hunting serves as a metaphor for pursuing one’s past, identity, and even sexuality.
The title “Fathers and Sons” also evokes generational conflict, much like Ivan Turgenev’s novel of the same name, which explores the intellectual and social divide between ageing conservatives and young nihilists. Nihilists reject all moral, religious, political, and social values, placing faith only in the individual. In Hemingway’s story, Nick’s father is conservative, while Nick himself embodies a form of disillusioned nihilism. Their tension reflects the universal conflict between fathers and their growing sons, a relationship filled with misunderstanding and conflict, except in one shared realm: hunting. Biographers describe Hemingway’s father, Clarence, as strict and demanding, evoking both resentment and reluctant admiration in Hemingway. Nick’s memories vividly portray this complicated emotional landscape.
Like Hemingway, Nick is a writer who uses writing to release trauma. He believes that by writing about his pain, he can rid himself of it, a practice Hemingway himself followed throughout his literary career. Though Nick’s memories are vivid and painful, he suppresses his father’s negative aspects when speaking to his son, showing patience and protective instinct. This suppression of trauma for the sake of the next generation makes Nick a typical Hemingway hero, stoic, restrained, and quietly heroic. In Nick’s eyes, his father was an excellent hunter and fisherman with “wonderful eyes,” reflecting the Hemingway ideal of masculine skill and endurance.
As in other Hemingway stories, nature provides a stark yet healing contrast to human cruelty. Nick describes the countryside he travels through as “good country,” unlike his father’s “not good remembering”. The lush woodland paths leading to the Indian camp represent both escape and renewal. The hemlock forest, where Nick experienced early encounters with hunting and sexuality, symbolises freedom from paternal oppression. Against this natural backdrop, Nick’s inner conflicts gain depth and universality.
“Fathers and Sons” is written in the signature “Hemingway Style”, characterised by economy and precision, also known as the “iceberg theory”, a literary approach born from his journalistic past. The iceberg theory, also known as the theory of omission, suggests that a story’s deeper meaning lies beneath the surface, visible only through implication.
In conclusion, the story is a meditation on memory and how identity is shaped across generations.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Simon & Schuster, 1998.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Nick Adams Stories. Scribners, 1972.
“Hemingway’s Writing Style” (PDF). The Big Read. National Endowment for the Arts. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-04-29.
Hemingway, Ernest; George Plimpton. “The Art of Fiction No. 21”. Paris Review.
“Fathers and Sons (short story).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, last edited 6 months ago, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fathers_and_Sons_%28short_story%29. Wikipedia
“Fathers and Sons Summary (Ernest Hemingway).” eNotes, www.enotes.com/topics/fathers-and-sons. eNotes
Dr Aswathy Aravindakshan is a teacher, bilingual writer and artist with over two decades of experience in teaching English language and literature. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of English at NSS College for Women, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India. Her blog, ashlit.in brings together academic resources, creative writing in Malayalam and English, and visual art. The platform features lecture notes, study materials, poems, reflections, short prose, and a curated collection of her paintings. Through this space, she seeks to foster learning, creativity, and meaningful engagement with literature and the arts.
Discover more from ashlit.in
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Comment on “FATHERS AND SONS: A Journey Through Generations”