A Way You'll Never Be

Short story by Ernest Hemingway

"A Way You'll Never Be" is a 1933 short story by Ernest Hemingway, published by Charles Scribner in the short story collection Winner Take Nothing. It features the character Nick Adams as he recovers from a traumatic head wound.

Synopsis

Nick Adams has been wounded in Italy during World War I and is suffering from shell-shock, or post-traumatic stress syndrome. He is plagued by nightmares, in which he sees the eyes of an Austrian soldier shooting at him, a yellow house, and a river. Nick's friend, the Italian Captain Paravicini, believes that Nick's head wound should have been trepanned; he worries about Nick's bouts of "craziness." One hot summer day, Nick bicycles from the village of Fornaci to Captain Paravicini's encampment. He sees many bloated corpses and scattered pieces of paper. When Nick reaches camp, an Italian second lieutenant questions Nick's identification papers before Paravicini intervenes and coaxes Nick to lie down and rest before he returns to Fornaci. He shows concern about Nick's mental state. After lying down and dreaming, Nick leaves Paravicini's encampment and goes to find his bike.

Reception

Hemingway listed "A Way You'll Never Be" as one of his seven favorite of his short stories, but the collection Winner Take Nothing received generally negative reviews from contemporary critics and the short story itself was largely ignored.^[1]^[2] The short story was published in 1933.^[3]

References

^ Knodt, Ellen Andrews (2016). "Toward a Better Understanding of Nicholas Adams in Hemingway's "A Way You'll Never Be"". The Hemingway Review. 35 (2): 70–86. ISSN 1548-4815.
^ Quick, Paul S. (2003). "Hemingway's "A Way You'll Never Be" and Nick Adams's Search for Identity". The Hemingway Review. 22 (2): 30–44. ISSN 1548-4815.
^ Alberge, Dalya (2020-08-02). "Ernest Hemingway's published works littered with errors, study claims". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2024-02-07.

Ernest Hemingway

Bibliography

Novels

The Torrents of Spring (1926)
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
To Have and Have Not (1937)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Nonfiction

Death in the Afternoon (1932)
Green Hills of Africa (1935)

Posthumous

A Moveable Feast (1964)
Islands in the Stream (1970)
The Dangerous Summer (1985)
The Garden of Eden (1986)
True at First Light (1999)
Under Kilimanjaro (2005)

Short stories

"Up In Michigan" (1921)
"Indian Camp" (1924)
"The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" (1925)
"The End of Something" (1925)
"The Three-Day Blow" (1925)
"The Battler" (1925)
"A Very Short Story" (1925)
"Soldier's Home" (1925)
"The Revolutionist" (1925)
"Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" (1925)
"Cat in the Rain" (1925)
"Out of Season" (1925)
"Cross Country Snow" (1925)
"My Old Man" (1925)
"Big Two-Hearted River" (1925)
"Banal Story" (1926)
"Today is Friday" (1926)
"A Canary for One" (1927)
"Fifty Grand" (1927)
"Hills Like White Elephants" (1927)
"The Killers" (1927)
"The Undefeated" (1927)
"Che Ti Dice La Patria?" (1927)
"In Another Country" (1927)
"Now I Lay Me" (1927)
"A Simple Enquiry" (1927)
"Ten Indians" (1927)
"An Alpine Idyll" (1927)
"A Pursuit Race" (1927)
"On the Quai at Smyrna" (1930)
"Fathers and Sons" (1932)
"A Natural History of the Dead" (1932)
"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (1933)
"A Day's Wait" (1933)
"The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" (1933)
"A Way You'll Never Be" (1933)
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936)
"The Capital of the World" (1936)
"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1936)
"Old Man at the Bridge" (1938)

Short story
collections

Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923)
In Our Time (1925)
Men Without Women (1927)
Winner Take Nothing (1933)
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1961)
The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (1969)
The Nick Adams Stories (1972)
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987)
Ernest Hemingway: The Collected Stories (1995)

Story fragments

"On Writing"

Poetry

88 Poems (1979)
Complete Poems

Plays

Today is Friday (1926)
The Fifth Column (1938)

Screenplays

The Spanish Earth (1937 film)

Letters and
journalism

By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (1967)
Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961 (1981)
Dateline: Toronto (1985)
The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway (2011)

Adaptations

The Sun Also Rises	1957 film 1984 film Opera The Select (The Sun Also Rises) Ballet
"The Killers"	1946 film 1956 film 1964 film Bukowski short story
A Farewell to Arms	1932 film 1957 film 1966 TV series
To Have and Have Not	1944 film The Breaking Point (1950) The Gun Runners (1958) Captain Khorshid (1987)
For Whom the Bell Tolls	1943 film 1959 TV play 1965 TV series 1984 song
The Old Man and the Sea	1958 film 1990 film 1999 animated film
Other film adaptations	The Macomber Affair (1947) Under My Skin (1950) The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962) Islands in the Stream (1977) Soldier's Home (1977) My Old Man (1979) After the Storm (2001) The Garden of Eden (2008) Across the River and into the Trees (2022)