Hemingway's "Indian Camp:" Life, Death, and Everything In-Between
By Jenna Frazier, Storyboard Project Team
Ernest Hemingway’s “Indian Camp,” a short story featured in his collection, In Our Time, offers an exceptionally poignant and insightful portrayal of a young boy’s gradual initiation into the adult world through confrontation of adult issues. The story follows Hemingway’s recurring protagonist, the young Nick Adams, and his father, Dr. Adams, as they travel to a nearby Indian village to assist a young laboring Indian woman with her delivery. Amidst a scene of blood and gore that includes a makeshift cesarean section and the Indian husband’s suicide, Nick finds himself forced to choose between empathy for the anguishing woman and husband and the triumphant, cold, degrading rationality of his own father. The story implies that Nick’s response to the violence and suffering inflicted on others will ultimately define his own sense of masculinity. Thus an exploration of how racism, sexism, violence, suffering, and stoicism impact the process of defining perceptions of masculinity in the story sheds light on the essence of the literary work itself, and furthers a deeper understanding of these complex issues as they arise.
A team of students enrolled in Professor Alan Liu’s English 149 course at the University of California, Santa Barbara decided to create a storyboard project that would enhance readers’ comprehensive understanding of the text and illuminate certain features of the text that would likely remain obscured without an in-depth analysis. Using Macintosh’s iWeb site-building program, they created a chronological aesthetic representation of the work that attempted to capture the most complex issues in the text and compile them into a digestible, user-friendly, interactive and artistic format. This “one-stop research guide” of sorts (accessible here) consists of tiles that link to various scenes of the work, where the viewer then finds superficial as well as analytic features such as plot summary, character analysis, thematic content, text analysis tools, and outside resources related to the work itself. An additional interactive page invites users to share their own interpretation of “Indian Camp” or leave feedback relevant to the site’s function, content and utility. All these features are designed to promote a democratic yet reliable source of information that both represents the text and engages with it a way that is conducive to new discoveries.
The Storyboard Project facilitates a richer, more complex understanding of “Indian Camp” in a broad, representative sense and in the finer details. The black-and-white aesthetic of the page, for example, sets the tone for a story that is stark, cold, contemplative, melancholy, and reflective—almost like a memory:
The absence of color also helps isolate the core ideas in the story without the distraction of overly decorative graphics. In addition, the image chronology of the tiles with corresponding themes such as “hesitation, contemplation, illumination, etc.” helps visual learners internalize the story in a way that mere text cannot. The interactive commenting page helps kinetic learners gain knowledge about the text by participating in the information-acquiring process, and gives all site users a sense of value in that their voices can be heard and their opinions do matter. By reaching out to such diverse audiences and including such extensive information relevant to the text, the Storyboard Project is a truly valuable learning tool in both an educational and artistic sense for scholars and the general population alike.
“Indian Camp” is a brief yet enormously complex story, and the Storyboard Project organizes and presents the nuances of the work in a way that simultaneously simplifies and expands the subject matter. Easily obtained and reductive facts like plot summaries and character descriptions accompany expansive tools in the form of text-analysis instruments such as Tapor and pertinent academic articles by expert scholars. All of these learning devices engage the reader in a way that helps him or her understand the young Nick Adams’ perilous attempt to transition from childhood to adolescence, and how his father’s example informs him of how one’s reaction to suffering, violence, and death of disenfranchised people influences perceived masculinity. Sexism and racism also influence this process, and the story implies that these attitudes are essential to preserving a man’s strength and even survival.
From the beginning of the story, the dichotomy between Nick as a young boy and Dr. Adams as a grown man is defined by how they react to the scene of suffering and violence that surrounds them as the young Indian woman painfully struggles during labor. Dr. Adams acts stern and in control: for example, he “ordered some water to be put on the stove” and makes preparations for the pending operation “carefully and thoroughly,” all the while explaining the woman’s condition to Nick in a detached, almost scientific and methodical tone (Hemingway). Nick, on the other hand, appears oblivious and disconcerted by the chaos surrounding him. He asks his father where they are going on the way over to the Indian camp, and responds pleadingly to the woman’s screams: “Oh, Daddy, can’t you give her something to make her stop screaming?” which illustrates his empathy for the woman’s pain and his supposedly naïve character (Hemingway). Dr. Adams responds coldly that “I don’t hear [her screams] because they’re not important” (Hemingway). This establishes Dr. Adams as the model of masculine stoicism which is here defined by one’s ability to ignore the pain of others, specifically marginalized “others” such as women and minorities. Nick’s obvious discomfort towards the woman’s suffering characterizes him as emotional, empathetic, and therefore childlike as opposed to his father’s apathetic masculinity. These differences in reaction to suffering emphasize that the gulf between childhood and manhood lies in the ability to reject the pain of others and focus on self-preservation.
Dr. Adams and Uncle George demonstrate sexism and racism towards the Indian characters, and the story suggests that Nick learns it is necessary to degrade victims in order to avoid becoming associated with them. When Dr. Adams claims that the woman’s screams “are not important,” he symbolically disregards the pain of women and Native Americans as unimportant (Hemingway). Also, the story that is supposedly about a woman giving birth includes no dialogue from the woman herself, but frequently mentions her screaming profusely. This emphasizes her role as an object of suffering, and “makes a statement about womanhood or femininity in general—she is wordless, and the only noise she makes reflects the pain of her very female-specific condition” (Storyboard Project, Illumination page). Uncle George’s outcry of “damn squaw bitch” directed at the Indian woman manages to incur terms both racist and derogatory towards women in one brief slur (Hemingway). Dr. Adam’s boastful attitude when he gloats about “doing a Caesarian with a jack-knife and…nine-foot, tapered gut leaders” implies racism because the reader wonders whether he would have used such impromptu materials and then bragged about it on a white lady, and sexism because he treats the woman’s traumatic situation as a mere medical conquest (Hemingway). He is described as “exalted and talkative as football players are in the dressing room after a game” which emphasizes that he has detached himself from the extreme agony of the scene to the extent that he is able to relish in the crudeness of it with pleasure (Hemingway). Nick, however, has clearly been bothered by the event: he is “looking away so as not to see what his father was doing” during the operation, “didn’t look” and “did not watch” as his father made the incision, and says that “his curiosity had been gone for a long time” (Hemingway). His uncomfortable avoidance of the situation contrasts starkly with his father’s boisterous bragging, and further illustrates the distinction between childhood empathy with suffering and adult masculine detachment to it.
The Tapor Word Cloud tool utilized in the Storyboard Project reveals the disproportionate use of masculine words over feminine words and further emphasizes the theme of sexism in “Indian Camp,” despite the apparently feminine subject matter of a woman giving birth. These tables document the occurrence of masculine and feminine words according to frequency:
Masculine Words
Word
|
Frequency
|
His
|
33
|
Nick
|
28
|
Father
|
18
|
George
|
17
|
Uncle
|
13
|
Feminine Words
She
|
11
|
Her
|
9
|
Woman
|
7
|
Lady
|
3
|
Not only do the masculine words occur with much greater frequency and in greater number, they are more likely to occur as specific names or titles whereas the feminine words occur mostly in the form of pronouns. This demonstrates that the text does not really concern the woman giving birth, as a superficial reading of the plotline would suggest. Rather, the story is about the male characters involved in the situation and their various reactions to the events that take place. The disparaging treatment of women and the exaggerated emphasis on men suggests not only the element of sexism in the story, but the importance in the men avoiding empathy with the woman in order to establish their own strength and dominance.
The final message of the story hinges on the reactions of men towards the story’s objects of suffering and how these reactions impact their essential qualities of perceived masculinity and survival. Nick faces a choice at the beginning of the story: he can either empathize with the suffering woman and “damn [himself] to a death of the self in endless empathy,” or identify with his coldly rational father and lose his “capacity for humanity” (Tyler, 38). To empathize with the woman is portrayed as the childish reaction, as Nick does this at the beginning of the story before he has experienced the violent situation. To reject her suffering and rise above it is portrayed as the masculine, stoic, adult reaction, as Dr. Adams does by saying that “her screams do not matter” and gloating about his medical performance after the operation. After viewing his father and Uncle George’s objectification of the woman based on her gender and race, however, Nick slowly makes his decision to side with his father, and at the end of the story demonstrates the feeling of triumph and invincibility he gains from ignoring the woman’s suffering when he says “he felt quite sure that he would never die” (Hemingway). Thus the characters’ perceptions of masculinity are informed by their reactions to the suffering of those around them. The Storyboard Project conveys this theme through their project page and invites the user to engage in further exploration through their inclusion of a link to Lisa Tyler’s article, “‘Dangerous Families’ and ‘Intimate Harm’ in Hemingway’s ‘Indian Camp,’” which thoroughly researches this concept. In this way, the project helps users understand a complex idea that they would normally have had to spend much time, contemplation, and external research to discover on their own. It does not do the analytical work for them and thereby deprive them of the learning process as some might argue, but rather it eliminates the trivial obstacles of the time and effort it takes to research so that the user can spend more time actually discovering the story’s message.
Hemingway’s “Indian Camp” is a strikingly profound story with many multifaceted layers of meaning, and the Storyboard Project at UCSB helps dissect and reassemble the text in all its complexity. Through its easy chronology and organization, aesthetic appeal, and comprehensive analysis and research, the project reveals the themes of suffering, violence, racism, sexism, and their influence on perceptions of masculinity in a way that would not have previously been possible without extensive research and personal contemplation. The interactive nature of the project also allows readers to unite and share their interpretations of the story and add on to the carefully researched analysis done by the Storyboard team, which provides moderation between democratic and regulated information that promotes a safe balance between reliable sources and diverse opinions. Nick Adams’ initiation from childhood to adolescence through the vehicles of the aforementioned themes is made visible, accessible, and thoroughly comprehensible through the Storyboard Project. Without the insight and analysis provided by this project, many aspects of this provocative story would go unnoticed by many readers. The storyboard medium has allowed accessible technology and literary discovery to truly coalesce in a way that is revelatory and infinitely valuable to the literary world and the population at large.
Works Cited
Hemingway, Ernest. "Indian Camp." 1924. 13 February 2008.
Tyler, Lisa. "'Dangerous Families' and 'Intimate Harm' in Hemingway's 'Indian Camp.'" Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48 (April 2006): 37-53.
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