Nick at Night: Nocturnal Metafictions in Three Hemingway Short Stories

"Now I Lay Me" functions as a kind of subtext for two other related Nick Adams tales, "A Way You'll Never Be" and "Big Two-Hearted River," both of which revisit, with a similar emotional intensity, the material of childhood memories, conjured by the young soldier Nick in "Now I Lay Me" as a means of keeping his soul in his body. In all three stories, as Nick composes to avoid decomposition, the reader witnesses the indissoluble link between life, death, and the practice of fiction.