Ernest Hemingway “In Our Time”

In “Big Two-Hearted River: Part I”, we are told that Nick “felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs.” This is the first we learn of Nick’s compulsion to write. After a close reading of both parts of “Big Two-Hearted River”, please explain how it represents not only Nick’s arrival at a sense of Self, but, further than this, his emergence as an author. Could these things be one and the same?