Indian Camp

Like much of Hemingway’s work, “Indian Camp” is concerned with the performance of masculinity. As Nick relates with his father and uncle and contrasts them to the Indigenous men he sees in the camp, he considers his own path toward manhood.

“Indian Camp” is an initiation story, a subgenre in which a protagonist is put through a new experience that changes them. Nick is being initiated into manhood by his father, who takes Nick to perform an operation without telling him beforehand. Throughout the story, Dr. Adams performs the white American masculinity that he shares with his brother, Uncle George, which he expects his son to emulate. The distinction between white and Indigenous masculinity begins in the boats, as the Indigenous men row while Nick “lay back with his father’s arm around him” (14) and Uncle George smokes a cigar. While Dr. Adams later demonstrates masculinity through action, this opening scene establishes a racial hierarchy, wherein white masculine dominance can be expressed through leisure.

Ostensibly, Nick is being initiated into Dr. Adams’s profession by performing as an intern and helping with the procedure. This work—particularly how Dr. Adams performs it—symbolizes the stereotypical division between masculine, scientific objectivity and feminine emotion and nature. Dr. Adams’s actions hew closely to this divide. Throughout the surgery, the pregnant woman—like all other Indigenous characters—is unnamed and does not speak. Dr. Adams brings surgical implements but not anesthesia, and when Nick is distressed by the woman’s screams, his father assures him that “her screams are not important” (16). Likewise, he refuses to touch her quilt, asking George to remove it instead; he is comfortable wielding tools that cut and dissect but will not touch things that give comfort. The other men—white and Indigenous—affirm this gender hierarchy by physically holding down the woman while she endures an unanesthetized cesarean; an unnecessary act of violence when she could have easily been subdued with anesthesia. At the end of the procedure, Dr. Adams brags about his hack job, calling his work with “a jack-knife” “one for the medical journal” (18). His masculinity is intertwined with his role as a doctor, and he believes that this callous, brutal performance is not just normal but exemplary.

Nick struggles to perform this cold, violent masculinity. He is not eager to participate in the surgery, and throughout the process, he refuses to look at the incisions or stitches. While the other men hold down the screaming woman, Nick holds the washbasin instead, doing as little as possible to participate. It seems as though Nick is able to avoid seeing much of the operation—the narration devotes two sentences to the procedure and does not describe it beyond the woman being held down and biting Uncle George. He cannot, however, avoid seeing the bloody aftermath of the woman’s husband’s suicide, and he describes the man’s body in more detail.

With this, Nick is presented with two paths forward in his journey toward manhood. While he is uncomfortable with his father’s actions, the night in the shanty offered him a haunting alternative in the Indigenous man’s quiet suicide. On the journey back home, Nick has a revelation that could be read as a relief. After noting that his father is now rowing the boat, Nick feels “quite sure that he would never die” (19). While he is troubled by what he has witnessed, peppering his father with questions about death, the scene at the end is tranquil. This indicates that Nick feels secure in the path toward masculinity embodied by his father; he feels above death, setting himself apart from the carnage he witnessed in the camp.