Hermie is a short story about child- and adulthood, unconditional love, and friendship. In the story we are met by memories from a marine biologist’s childhood, and his fight to rid himself of a tender memory of losing a close friend. The short novel promotes that one should not get so intellectual that one loses contact with the real.

In Hermie, the main character is a male whose name we do not know. He is a marine biologist, working at a university. He is situated at the Eighteenth International Conference of Limnology and Oceanology in Salzburg. The main character seems to be a nervously inclined man – something we get the impression of in the beginning where he says that “the introduction to Marine Biology I give to my freshmen every year is enough to rattle me,” and when he reveals that he repeats a mantra before doing such speeches: “Calm Blue Ocean.” He also appears to be of some importance, since he is invited to such an event, and since he is to give a speech. Even though the main character is a grown man, he appears to still have an imaginative mind. This is presented to the reader when he goes to the bathroom before his speech, to rid himself of his nervousness. Here he meets a talking hermit crab called Hermie that apparently was the main character’s imaginary friend when he was a child. He speaks with Hermie until there are only minutes left before his speech, and flushes him down the toilet before leaving the bathroom. He speaks with Hermie about all their summer adventures from his childhood, and how they used to have a bond of unconditional love. We see how he has changed, when Hermie asks him if he can move in with the main character and his family. The main character lets Hermie down, and tells him no. His current life does not have room for Hermie, and he gives Hermie a lot of excuses to avoid telling the truth: He does not need Hermie any more. He was self-confident now.
The main character narrates the story in first person. He includes his immediate thoughts as he gets them, and we generally get a good look of the story through his eyes. While this gives us insight in the main character’s mind, it does however create the unreliability of subjectivity. We do not achieve an objective point of view, but instead we get the subjective opinion of the main character. The credibility of what is displayed through the eyes of the narrator is not quite as big as the one from an omniscient narrator.

The relationship between Hermie and the main character goes a long way back. The main character did not have many friends to play with when him and his family went to Turtle Beach, so he played with the shellfish he could find: “Stella the Starfish? Ernie the Urchin? Gulliver?” All animals that live near the shore. Naturally, Hermie never actually spoke to him, but with him being a young child, it was part of playing that the “toys” could speak. The bond between the two appears as being very strong, and filled with the previously mentioned unconditional love. The main character’s mother involuntarily separated them, since she wanted the main character to have human friends.

Most of the story takes place on the bathroom at the Sheraton Hotel in Salzburg. The main character has had many experiences with the Sheraton hotels being very clean, and in perfect order. Once again he is not let down by he Sheraton: “…the mirror was unsmudged, there were no puddles around the urinals, and the bank of three sinks was a pure white porcelain.” When the main character relives his childhood memories, they take place at Turtle Beach on Siesta Key in Southwest Florida.
I find that the sterile, barren, and cold bathroom symbolises the main character’s current life. He is a grown-up man who has a job, a family, and a responsibility. He no longer has time to play, and he does not have the same volition to do so. There is nothing on the bathroom that appears just a little out of context. Everything is perfectly lined up, and strictly positioned. Contrary to that, Turtle Beach symbolises the main character’s childhood, and how he used to have a much more playful mind. It symbolises how he had a child’s perks of being without a responsibility, and being careless for anyone and anything but oneself and one’s family. As earlier mentioned, the main character flushes Hermie down the toilet before leaving the bathroom. I have found that this can be interpreted in two different ways. My first interpretation is that the main character flushes his problems down the drain. Instead of taking the responsibility of Hermie’s future, he denies his request to live with the main character. Of course this only happens in his imagination, but he probably thinks about his old childhood friend from time to time, and in his nervous state of mind – like when he was separated from Hermie – at the bathroom, the memory of Hermie is triggered. Of course the main character’s mind is filled with his closely due speech, so he just throws the old memories away, and focuses on the real life. This leads to my second interpretation. By flushing out Hermie, the main character can finally let go of the sad memory of losing his childhood friend. He might have lived for however many years since then, and thought about saying goodbye to so many fun summers with Hermie, never to be repeated. He even says to himself as he lowers the lid after flushing that “It seemed like the right thing to do.” Now he had built up the courage to let go of these tender memories, so it no longer seemed a big deal to deliver his speech. The main character reportedly “…didn’t even feel nervous…”