Think of the initiations in your life to date. Not the usual, the expected, the cake-and-ice-cream variety. Think of the ones that caught you off guard--those moments in which life revealed itself to you in all its befuddling, blistering complexity, leaving you feeling exposed in the presence of something beyond your ability to describe it, to give it a name.

In this Nick Adams sequence, a major thread in In Our Time (1925), Hemingway places his evolving, developing protaganist in a series of circumstances that challenge him to embrace some difficult truth about his own humanity or about the world around him. Sometimes Nick resorts childishly, naively to romantic illusions about the world as he would have it look; in other moments Nick takes steps forwards into life's murky swamps.

Pay very close attention to the signs on the surface of these iceberg-stories. Notice the lack of a detached narrator here, a voice that shapes our opinion of a character or even goes so far as to spell out "the moral of the story." The radical innovation of Hemingway's prose is the amount of trust he places in the barest of details to lead us much deeper into Nick's psyche (which, as we will see, is itself a symbol for our collective human psyche, for he is "Adams"--the original man, the everyman, the American man).

As you read these stories, spend time noting and thinking about details that might lead us from the visible to the invisible portion of the iceberg. What exactly is that bass that jumps out of the warm, rippling water just as Nick fantasizes about his own immortality in "Indian Camp"? What does that gate through which Dick Boulton and friends enter and leave represent in "Doctor"? What do the two rods featured at the end of "End of Something" represent? And what of the orchard and the Wagner apple that begin "Three-Day Blow"?

These are just sample questions to get you started. These stories are loaded with small details that lead in some way to the heart of the story and to the life lessons and mysteries Nick encounters on his journey to adulthood.