Indian Camp by Ernest Hemingway

The novel is about a boy, Nick. He is going on a little trip to an Indian Camp with his father and uncle where a pregnant Indian woman needs help. When they first arrive they follow a trail through the logging road with two Indians. The trail leads to the shanty where the pregnant woman is. The woman has big problems giving birth to her child. When the woman is in labour the doctor, Nick’s father, needs to do a caesarian. It is an ugly affair but finally the birth goes well.When they think they are done they find out that the father of the child has committed suicide. The father and the uncle seem to handle it well but they don’t want Nick to see it. He sees it anyway and on their way home he asks his father questions about life.

The text is a short story from 1921 by the world famous author Ernest Hemingway. It’s chronologically structured and it starts in medias res and then it just goes on without any steps forward and back in time. This is typical for Hemingway because he writes his stories in a realistic style. He describes a scene of something and do not just write some fiction from his mind.

The language is a very important thing in Hemingway’s stories because he uses a very untypical way of writing stories. He tries to make a very short story without a lot of adjectives and descriptions of feelings of the characters. Instead of writing a lot of words and metaphors he cuts the story down to its minimum.
He does not spend words on describing the feelings, we get to know the characters feelings by the things they do. Hemingway just let the characters do things and does not let them reflect about the things they have done or are doing. He describes the realistic life and shows us how the characters act instead of letting them think a lot and afterwards let them act.

The story takes place in the United States of America near Michigan. In the start they row on a lake which leads to a beach. It is a hilly terrain with meadow and woodland. It is in the middle of the night and when they row home it is in the early morning.

The main character in the novel is Nick. He is a young and ignorant boy. His father has decided to take Nick with him so he can learn something. At first Nick is very curious but when the father starts to operate the pregnant woman Nick suddenly experiences the roughness of the real life. It is a very intense and uncomfortable experience for Nick. For example when the Indian woman screams he asks his father please to stop it. Nick also refuses to watch when the father operates.

The father and the uncle are both very cool and masculine in the things they do. An example is when the doctor just has finished the big operation of the Indian woman and the doctor says “That’s one for the medical journal”. That, and the note that says that it is like being in a dressing room after a football match, makes the mood of this scene very masculine and cool.

In the start of the text on their way to the Indian Camp in rowboats Nick lays back with his fathers arm around him. Nick seeks security and his father protects him. Nicks father probably sees the trip as a part of Nick is growing up. At the surgery the father is carried away in all his postoperative exhilaration and forgets that Nick is still is a boy. When Nicks experience the woman’s violent birth and sees the terrible sight of the father of the child’s suicide he is shocked. The relationship between the father and Nicks changes remarkably at the end. It is shown on the way home where they are separated from each other in the rowboat. The distance between them is presumably because Nick feels let down, shocked and confused over the situation. The father apologizes that he brought Nick along and calls him “Nickie”. The father knows he did not protect Nick and forgot that he is still a boy. He knows Nick always will have the terrible sights imprinted in his memory.

The storyteller is a third person who is totally objective to the story, and it is like it is some sort of a journalistic article. The story is told from an indirect point of view because it seems like we are watching and contemplating the whole action. We do not go into the minds of the characters and we do not hear anything about their feelings and thoughts.

The theme in the novel is about showing life in a realistic way with all the roughness within it. The story begins when they go on a little trip to help a woman giving birth to her child. That is a harmless thing and a thing that the doctor can handle safely, and that is also the reason why he takes Nick with him. The story’s mood suddenly changes. We got the feeling that the doctor can handle the situation and nothing uncontrollable is going to happen. But suddenly the father of the Indian child has committed suicide. So from a harmless situation it comes to a question about life and death where a new life is born and another life is gone. That is the roughness of life.

My conclusion is that Hemingway writes in a very special way. He shows life in a totally different way than other writers do in texts. He does not let us in to the characters’ minds. He does not let the action happen inside and he does not let us experience the characters’ reflections and thoughts, instead he lets us see the characters’ feelings by their actions. When he uses this writing technique he forces the reader to reflect on the story and to add the missing things himself.ia