Indian Camp by Ernest Hemingway was published in the short story collection In Our Time in 1925 and was the second story about Nick Adams, a semi-autobiographical character who appears in a slew of connected Hemingway stories. It is the first one published, as its predecessor was cut out by Hemingway.
Nick comes along with his father, who is a doctor, to help deliver an Indian baby. He is forced to perform a c-section despite a complete absence of medical materials of antiseptics, which makes the mother have quite a few yells of pain. Unfortunately her husband and unable to bear it, and he decides to kill himself.
Nick is surprised at the man’s suicide but his father reassures him that death isn’t all that bad. Nick thinks to himself that he will never die. The theme of not dying is something that sometimes recurs in Hemingway’s stories.
Indian Camp juxtaposes the brutal experience Nick witnesses with his pleasant feeling on return that he will never die. After seeing such a painful birth and then a suicide, it is hard to believe that immediately the young boy had gained a sense of immortality. It is likely a commentary of the strength of youth and nature versus more painful things in life.
Hemingway frequently paired nature with positivity in his stories, and the boy is strong enough to withstand his vision of pain because of the stronger power of beauty, nature, and the goodness and strength inherent in man. It is quite impressive that Hemingway wrote a story chiefly about negativity that ends up really being about the triumph of strength in the world, and something that he continues to do in his later stories.
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