'Indian Camp' af Ernest Hemingway, analyse

I agree that in Indian camp, the third person narrator not only tells the reader what he sees and hears, moves freely in and out of the characters’ minds.

B: I choose this kind of narrator, because we hear nicks fathers feelings, after taking his boy into the tragic birth. We also hear nicks feelings many times through the story, specially in the end of the story, when he are sitting with his fathers arms around him. He felt that he would never die.

2. Indian Camp summary

In the beginning, two Indians are standing waiting at the lakeshore, at a drawn up rowboat. Nick and his father got in the stern of the boat. One of the two Indians starts to row the boat, with nick and his father. Uncle George sat in the stern of the camp boat, having another Indian rowing. The Indians row very quickly, with fast strokes. Nick sees that it is very dark and misty in the weather, and his father tells him that they are going to help an Indian woman who is very sick. They arrived the other side of the bay; uncle George gives the Indians some cigars. Following an Indian with a lantern, they walk through meadow and the woods. At last they see light from a Indian shanty ahead, that’s where the barkpeelers live. Inside one of the shanties, they see the Indian woman lying on a wooden bunk, she lay in the lower bunk, and in the upper bunk is her husband, he had cut his foot three days before. The Indian woman was having labor, she had tried to have her baby for to days, and the Indians have tried everything to help her. Nicks father poured a half kettle of water into a basin, the other half he put several things in, which he unwrapped from a handkerchief. While nicks father is washing his hands very carefully in the basin, he tell nick about having labor and how this operation could be difficult to make, he might have to preform a caesarean operation. The Indian woman screams a lot, but nicks father say they don’t have any anesthetic. As nicks father starts to operate, uncle George and two Indians are holding the screaming Indian woman, nick hold the basin. After long time waiting, nicks father takes the baby out and he slaps it, to make it breath. Nicks father ask nick how he like to be an intern, nick says it is all right, while looking away. Nicks father put the placenta in the basin, and sew up the incision, he made during the labor. The Indian woman was sleeping, not knowing that she just had a baby and they all stand up. Doing a caesarean with a jackknife and sewing it up with nine-foot, tapered gut leaders, after such an operation everyone were elated. They talk about how the proud father would be. They look up to the upper bunk, the father’s throat had been cut from ear to ear, and an open razor blade lay, edge up. He had commit suicide. Nicks father got nick out of there fast, he was sorry for having brought nick into all that. At the way home in the rowboat, nick sat in the stern with his fathers arms around him.