30 pages • 1 hour read
Ernest HemingwayIndian Camp
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1924A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Nick Adams
The story’s protagonist, Nick Adams is a sensitive young man who joins his father on the trip to the Indigenous camp. Although the text does not explicitly state this, one gets the sense that he does so reluctantly. For much of the story, Nick simply observes his father’s actions, following orders when told to do so. A brief exchange in which Nick’s father rebukes the boy for saying that he knows about pregnancy suggests that he wishes to impress his father.
Nick shows himself to be an inquisitive boy. Throughout the story, he asks his father a number of questions, including those about death and dying. He is also sensitive and less used to the masculine bravado and bloody nature of his father’s profession. He turns away three times during gory scenes, though he cannot avoid seeing the dead Indigenous man’s slit throat or the pool of blood he lays in.
The narrator says that by the end of the story, Nick felt sure he would never die. The ambiguous wording points to a couple of possibilities. He may feel that he will never die because of his closeness to his father, who is rowing the boat away from the camp and who helped deliver the baby. However, he may also be indulging in the ignorance of youth, turning to fantasy against the realities of death that he just witnessed. The ambiguity underscores the complexity of Nick as a character, who is permanently changed by the story’s events. He’s a young man, full of potential, who already senses the reality of death as a possibility before him.
Pregnant Woman
The story centers on a woman struggling to give birth, though she is given no dialogue or interiority. The text reveals that she has been in labor for two days, and her baby is in the breech position. The narrator does not reveal if she called for Dr. Adams or if someone else in the tribe brought him after her suffering grew so great. By the time Dr. Adams finishes the procedure, she is tired and pale, and “did not know what had become of the baby or anything” (18).
Until that point, the pregnant woman makes herself known through her screams and her fighting. The screams permeate the village and upset everyone around, not just the sensitive Nick, who asks his father to make her stop. Even the men, except for her husband, flee and go to the other side of the camp. Her screams represent anger, a refusal to accept that she does not matter. That same resistance can be seen in her fighting and struggling, as it takes four men to hold her down while Dr. Adams performs surgery, and she bites Uncle George.
The fact that she targets Uncle George may point to a reason for her struggle. Between George’s reaction to the bite, the way other men respond to George, and her husband’s suicide, it seems as though George is the father of her child. If so, her screams and struggling represent the sexual violence inherent in colonial projects, underscored by the four men who hold her down as her body is cut open. Overall, the pregnant woman embodies the ways men dehumanize women to maintain sexist power relations.
Dr. Adams
Although his reason for doing so is unclear, the physician Dr. Adams chooses to bring his son Nick and brother George to the camp. When they arrive at the camp, Dr. Adams takes charge, giving everyone the orders necessary to deliver the baby. Despite his leadership qualities, the story does not present Dr. Adams in a positive light. He neglects to bring anesthesia for the surgery, subduing his patient by having four men restrain her instead. After completing the surgery, the text compares him to “football players […] in the dressing room after a game” (18), full of energy and braggadocio. He is disinterested in his patient outside of an opportunity to show off his skills. The text describes the woman as cold and limp after the procedure, but Dr. Adams does not provide any further care. Moreover, his attention is focused on the men involved, calling fathers “the worst sufferers in these little affairs” (18).
While Dr. Adams presents himself as an authority, he cannot provide substantial answers to Nick’s existential questions about death and suicide. Still, he plays the role of navigator in the final scene, rowing himself and his son back toward their hometown. With this, he embodies the text’s themes about Performing Masculinity and colonial violence.
Uncle George
At first glance, Uncle George seems like the most unremarkable member of the group; there is no explanation as to why he joins the expedition. He rides to the camp in a separate boat, smoking cigars along the way. He helps out when told, but otherwise either hands out cigars to other men or sulks in the corner. He is bitten on the arm by the pregnant woman, an action that provokes a slur-filled response. The Indigenous men laugh when he shouts. Taken together these events imply that Uncle George is the father of the child. With this interpretation, Uncle George can be considered another embodiment of masculine performance and power relations between colonizers and the colonized.
The Husband
Of all the major characters in “Indian Camp,” the reader knows the least about the pregnant woman’s husband. He simply sits on the top bunk smoking a pipe. Early on, the narrator describes the wound on the husband’s foot, but outside the fact that it occurred with an axe three days earlier, there are no further details. From that, the reader sees the husband had already been wounded and was already suffering in his own way. Sometime during the operation, the husband slits his own throat, silently dying while the baby is delivered.
Before the story reveals that the husband has killed himself, Dr. Adams observes that fathers are “usually the worst sufferers in these little affairs” (18). Combined with the doctor’s praise that “he took it all pretty quietly” (18), the text positions the husband as a foil to the pregnant woman. Where the pregnant woman screams, the husband observes, turning his fight inward. In the eyes of Dr. Adams, the husband died because “[h]e couldn’t stand things” (19), but both the woman screaming and his suicide are acts of resistance. They reject the presence of Nick’s family in the camp, thereby rejecting the violent masculinity and colonial violence they represent.
Related Titles
By Ernest Hemingway
