Early Signs of Deterioration- "Now I Lay Me" and Nick's Mental Struggle
Andy Kristensen
Ernest Hemingway’s “Now I Lay Me” is, according to literary critic Margot Sempreora, part of a three-piece “trilogy” that combines certain themes and underlying messages with two other Hemingway stories, all centering around one of his main protagonists, Nick Adams. She writes that the stories all really focus on trauma that Nick encountered when he was a younger boy, specifically trauma caused by the destruction of certain objects of his father’s by his mother. She points to specific details in the story to prove her point, and while she makes a good argument, I would in turn argue that she is missing a fundamental point of “Now I Lay Me”: while it might paint a picture of unrealized childhood trauma, the real message of the story deals more with painting a picture of how war can shellshock soldiers, mainly men, so badly that they slowly start to lose their minds and spiral into the abyss that Hemingway has written about so often in his other short stories and novels—the slow reveal of a person going insane.
When “Now I Lay Me” was published in Men Without Women in 1927, the idea of PTSD, or shell shock, was still relatively taboo and shoved under the rug by most of the American public. Men were expected to go into battle, fight the “good fight,” and come out either dead or stronger. It wasn’t publically acceptable to display their emotions about the war or what they had seen, and they were expected to keep any problems they had to themselves. In “Now I Lay Me,” readers get a glimpse at this “silence” demanded by society—Nick never voices the problem that he has to John, the other man who is apparently wide awake as well next to him in the story. Even though they have a lengthy conversation near the end of the story, it never once dives beneath the surface—Nick never tells John the true reason he cannot sleep, instead trying to steer the subject away from his forced insomnia towards memories from back when the two of them were in Chicago (pg. 150). This shying away from the truth reveals Nick’s inner psyche—he doesn’t want to admit to John that he is slowly losing his mind because of what happened to him when he was wounded in the war, and he’s having trouble even admitting to himself what is happening to him.
Nick’s focus on somewhat trivial stories and details from his past also reveals how he is slowly losing his mind and the symptoms of PTSD are taking over—in order to not face the pain of remembering what happened in the field, Nick tries to bore himself and stay awake instead of falling asleep and entering “dreamland,” where he cannot control what he sees and his mind takes over. Because of his wounding, Nick has become extremely emotionally unstable—while he doesn’t literally believe his soul will leave his body if he falls asleep while it’s dark, he doesn’t want to face the possibility that he could dream an event along those lines if he doesn’t stay awake. Encountering such a dream of danger and explosions and soul-ripping would emotionally tip Nick over the edge, forcing him into a mental world that he has never been and does not want to confront. By recounting past stories and otherwise ordinary fishing trips to himself, Nick is keeping his mind occupied and away from what is truly on it—the pain and suffering caused by his wounding in the war and the damaged psyche he now owns because of what he saw and endured.
John’s comments on marriage also display how society at the time tried to get soldiers or other people experiencing PTSD to “get back with it” and ignore what happened to them mentally. Instead of being alone and losing his mind slowly, John tells Nick to focus his energies elsewhere: “You ought to get married, Signor Tenente. Then you wouldn’t worry” (152). John implies that by becoming married, Nick will focus all his energy and devotion to his wife, therefore forgetting about what happened to him when he was fighting in the war. John also implies that a wife can have healing powers and become a comfort to the pain that Nick has gone through by saying that “certain wives” are rich and will give Nick anything he desires (pg. 152).
Finally, the many references to “hearing the silkworms eating” throughout the story focuses on a tiny but crucial detail in the story. When Nick describes the eating, he describes actually listening to the night as well—he lays awake and pays attention to the littlest bumps in the night. This idea paints a certain picture in a reader’s head—one of a man staring straight up at the ceiling or sky with big eyes, absentminded and trying to find just one thing to focus on and hold onto. Hearing how the night ticks implies that Nick is slowly starting to lose his mind and become insane because of the societal and cultural images associated with such happenings—crazy people are painted as noticing the littlest of creaks and cracks at night, twitching at every little sound they hear. Actually hearing a silkworm eating is incredibly difficult, if not downright impossible, and Hemingway uses the seemingly absurd detail to force readers to face a slowly degenerating Nick laying awake at night, desperately focusing on inane noises and old memories so he doesn’t have to focus on the mental anguish that has been forced upon him by the events of the war.
