the battlefield, or, in one case, by a chance sexual encounter in a Chicago taxi. Critic E. R. Hageman notes the 1924 in our time vignettes are linked chronologically, spanning ten years from 1914 to 1923, and the choices were deliberate. World War I and the aftermath were "the experience of his generation, the experience that dumped his peers and his elders into graves, shell-holes, hospitals, and onto gallows. These were 'in our time', Hemingway is saying, and he remarks the significant and the insignificant." Themes The stories contain themes Hemingway was to revisit over the course of his career. He wrote about initiation rites, early love, marriage problems, disappointment in family life and the importance of male comradeship. The collection conjures a world of violence and war, suffering, executions; it is a world stripped of romance, where even "the hero of the bullfight chapter pukes". Hemingway's early-20th century is a time "out of season", where war, death, and tangled, unfulfilling relationships reign. Alienation in the modern world is particularly evident in "Out of Season", which bears similarities to Eliot's The Waste Land. Eliot's Waste Land motif exists throughout much of Hemingway's early fiction, but is most notable in this collection, The Sun Also Rises (1926), and A Farewell to Arms (1929). He borrowed Eliot's device of using imagery to evoke feeling. Benson attributes similarities between Hemingway and Eliot to Pound, who edited both. Motifs and themes reappear, the most obvious being the juxtaposition of life and death. There are some recurring images such as water and darkness – places of safety. Benson notes how, after reading the first few vignettes and stories, readers "realize we are in hell." Hemingway conjures a world where "the weak are pitilessly exploited by the strong, and ... all functions of life ... promise only pain." Hemingway's semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams is "vital to Hemingway's career", writes Mellow, and generally his character reflects Hemingway's experiences. Nick, who features in eight of the stories, is an alter ego, a means for Hemingway to express his own experiences, from the first story '"Indian Camp" which features Nick as a child. According to critic Howard Hannum, the trauma of birth and suicide Hemingway paints in "Indian Camp" rendered a leitmotif that gave Hemingway a unified framework for the Nick Adams stories. It is followed by "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife", which Mellows says is written with