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Indian Camp

In: English and Literature

Submitted By mehmetcetin
Words 1281
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Indian Camp
December 2011
Going through childhood, and taking a step into the adult world, is something that we all go through. Growing up is a very important part of life. Someday we’ll all become adults, and if you don’t develop yourself personally, you will remain having a childish personality and not have the skills life requires of you to live a life as a normal human being. Personal development is a theme that is very prominent in the short story “Indian Camp” written by Ernest Hemingway in 1921, where we meet the young boy Nick who’s on a mission with his father at an Indian camp. He gets introduced to the realities of birth and death in only one day, and when the day is over, he has got numerous of experiences and has obviously grown mentally. He has taken a little step further into becoming an adult. In my analysis I will make a brief summary, an analysis of the short story, where I will focus on Nick Adams development through the story and discuss which kind of initiation he goes through. Finally to sum up, I will make a conclusion.
Nick is a young boy accompanying his father and his uncle George to an Indian camp on the other side of a lake. Nicks father is a doctor, and the reason why they are visiting this Indian camp, is because the father is summoned by the Indians to help a young woman who’s been in labor for 2 days, still unable to deliver her baby. When the father arrives, she is lying in a bottom bunk; her husband, who cut his foot badly with an axe three days before, is lying in the bunk bed above her. The doctor performs a cesarean on the woman with his jackknife, delivers the baby, and sews up the woman’s incision. After the improvised surgery, Nick’s father looks into the top bunk and discovers that the young Indian husband, who listened to his wife screaming during her labor pains and during her cesarean, has cut his throat. The violence

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