Nick Adams is the sole character in “Big Two-Hearted River” (although one might argue that nature itself is a character in the narrative). Nick is portrayed as emotionally detached, a keen observer of nature, and comfortable alone in the woods.

Nick Adams is a recurring character in Hemingway’s short fiction, the protagonist in two dozen stories, and he has much in common with the author. Like Nick in “Big Two-Hearted River,” Hemingway was an outdoors person. Each summer his family traveled to northern Michigan, where his father took him hunting and fishing, and as a 20-year-old veteran of World War I, Hemingway went camping and fishing with high school friends in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

In keeping with Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” of narrative, little of Nick’s backstory is revealed in the text. He gets off the train expecting to find the town of Seney, which he remembers fondly, but instead finds the ruins of the town in a fire-ravaged landscape. It’s clear that he’s been away for some time, and that the destruction of the town weighs heavily on his emotions, but the connection between all this and the recently ended First World War is implied rather than stated.