An Analysis of Up in Michigan My choice of this story for analysis is based on what I think is the very American sentiment in this tale. Only the title has this American sound: Up in Michigan. Right from the start, setting the story deep in the country's soil. The title seems like the beginning of an old story, once upon a time in Michigan... it ends there and pushes forward the "unfinished" and never defined path of the story. And at the same time it means that this is just another story, told hundreds of times before. The story is set in a very small town, which plays a big role in how the characters interact with each other. The two main characters of the story are each introduced in their own little paragraph at the beginning of the story. Their way of meeting is, one gets the feeling, not by chance, but rather because the town is so small that they could never avoid meeting. A sentence like "One day she discovered that she liked black hair..." (p.59) indicates that the girl Liz's falling in love with the blacksmith Jim is not the falling in love with a metropolitan person which is marked by the many choices of a larger environment. Liz's love or interest in Jim stems from the fact that there is no one else, it seems, and so over time she has developed an interest in him that is entirely based on an image she has of him in her mind. What is significant here is the obvious difference in how the two characters are described by Hemingway. Liz really likes Jim; Jim just likes her face. She thinks about him all the time; he never thinks about her. There is a basic imbalance... in the middle of the paper... the death of a young girl dreams, is at the same time the beginning of a life. It's the simple act of growing up, moving into another world, where nothing is as you dream it will be. Where bitterness is an inevitable part of your life. Where your hair may not always be tidy and your clothes may sometimes get dirty. The fact that Jim lies unconscious on the dock as if he now has the role of the dead buck only underlines that Liz is becoming aware of her own life. She rises from the battlefield like a heroine, at first shaking Jim in the faint hope that there might be a way back. ("...shook him one more time just to be sure"), but then realizing his destiny he stoically takes off his coat and, in imitation of the figure of the Pietà, places the coat over his past life, which in the figure of the Drunk Jim, he's dead.