'Indian Camp': analyse af temaer

First, I’d like to present the characters in the story, and their relationship to each other. I am not making this presentation to make the essay fill more; I’m doing it to give a better overview of the story.

Brothers

Uncle George (Nick’s uncle)

Nick’s father (Often referred to as”The Doctor”)

Bites

Operated on

Father/son

Laughs at

Pregnant Indian woman

Nick (A kid, also the main character)

Sees him dead

Husband/wife

Young Indian (Rows the family to the Indian camp)

Husband of pregnant woman (Kills himself)

I think the story’s theme is either death, death of pregnancy, suicide, or being a child. But the theme I’m most certain about is suicide, and death. The reason I think that the story is about suicide or death, is because the Indian husband kills himself, and Nick witness it. This puts a lot of thoughts in his head, as we see on page 10. He asks his dad “Do many people kill themselves, Daddy?” and “Is dying hard, Daddy?” This probably means that he’s never heard about people killing themselves, which means, in my opinion, that this is the stories theme. The final line of the text is “... he felt quite sure that he would never die.” I think this proves my point, that Nick is very new to the concept of death. The thing he learned on the trip to the Indian camp wasn’t how to do a caesarean incision. It was the death of the Indian man, that he learned something about, and a thing he took with him. He becomes curious about death, and he asks his dad all these questions about suicide. I think that the main theme in a text is the turning point of the story. If the turning point is that a man killed himself, then I’d say that the theme is death.