Book Review: Indian Camp by Ernest Hemingway

Indian Camp by Ernest Hemingway is a classic short story underlining the importance of rites of passage in humans’ lives, such as childbirth, fear of death, pain, life experiences, and so on. The story features Hemingway’s favourite character that often appears in his short stories: Nick Adam, most of these stories have been featured in ‘Our Time’ collection and bear resemblance to the events that occurred in his own life.

By title it may sound that it is a military or war story. In fact, an initiation story. Doctor Adams is being called to an Indian camp to help a woman deliver a baby. Well before dawn doctor Adams along with his brother, George, and his son Nick, cross the Michigan Lake with two Indian natives. The woman lying in a lower bunker bed has been suffering terrific labour pain for two days, and isn’t able to deliver the baby.

There Adams finds that the baby is in breech position; hence he operates on the woman with a non-surgical knife, without any anaesthetic. The baby is born successfully and the woman calms down, no wild screaming anymore. While working on the woman, Nick asks several questions and all the time he gets appropriate reasons. Moreover, it is his father that wants him to learn the things first-hand.

When the sun rises in the east they set out for return, soon they find that the husband of the woman who was lying in the upper bunk is dead: he had slit his throat while the woman was screaming in the pain. Nick faces both events at one go. Though the scene of death was unintentional but it brings the chapter of life and death to him paradoxically. Nick asks his father: Is dying hard? His father replies it is easy but depends on the situation. While going back in a boat, Nick too young to feel dreaded about death, he certainly feels that he would never die.

But why did that Indian man die or cut his throat remains unclear in the story. Perhaps he slit his throat to feel the pain his wife was going through during the cesarean operation with a non-surgical knife.

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