Indian Camp - Hemingway

I'm reading Hemingway's In Our Time (the version with short stories between each chapter) for a class right now and I just needed to talk about that first short story, "Indian Camp". We read it a few days ago but it has been bouncing around my skull. This is by no means a comprehensive or cohesive analysis. Also, due to this being about Hemingway, there are mentions of suicide.

In Our Time Link

First of all, what the hell. The story consists of Nick (who is of unspecified age but is likely a small child due to how people talk to him) and his father (who is a doctor) visiting the house of a Native American couple (referred to as Indian due to the time period) to help them with a pregnancy. This pregnancy is very painful for the mother and it ends up that the doctor must perform a c-section, which he does with a jack knife and line. The husband ends up killing himself over the whole affair. The short story ends with Nick asking about death and thinking to himself that he will never die. That's a lot to take in. It all comes at once and then the story is over.

There are a few specific things I would particularly like to bring up that caught my attention. I will bring them up in the order in which they happened.

When Nick and his father first enter, the woman is screaming in pain. The father is very succinct in his explanation of what labor is, albeit apathetic, and this makes sense for who he is. He is a doctor of a time before anesthetic and he works without good tools. The line that gets me is Nick saying "Oh, Daddy, can't you give her something to make her stop screaming?" and his father responding that he has no anesthetic and that "her screams are not important" and he doesn't hear them because of that. He is such a dramatically callous character, and Nick is so dramatically callous in a different manner, and neither of them understand what the woman is going through even a little bit. It's fascinating. The portrayal of the woman as this thing that must be dealt with and ignored is fascinating.

While the woman is being operated on, she bites Uncle George (who is the person that took Nick and his father to the house) and Uncle George calls her both a demeaning word for Native Americans and one for women. The reaction from a different Native American man, the one who had rowed them, was to laugh. I do not know what to make of this being in this piece other than how it adds to the treatment of women.

When the surgery is done, the father says that they should check on the husband as "they're usually the worst sufferers in these little affairs". This line is absolutely insane. Not only is the woman's pain completely ignored, but taken and put onto the man. It's so telling of the characters of these men, the character of Hemingway, and the character of men at the time. To make this line even more interesting, when Nick checks on the man, he has killed himself with a knife to the throat. It's not just something that Nick's father says offhandedly, but it is something that has a direct example(?) immediately after. Why did he kill himself? Was he so empathetic that he could not handle the pain his wife was going through? Did he feel emasculated by the affair and the fact he was separated from the other men to be with his wife? Knowing from later chapters that he was likely a logger, did he feel like he could not support his family or the continued destruction of his land?

Related to the death of the husband, I am unsure what to make of the fact that Nick did not look at the c-section which his father wanted him to look at, but he did see the dead husband which his father did not want him to see. There is probably something to be said about how women's pain is treated versus men's, and the dignities between the two of them, but I have not sorted my thoughts out.

The ending of this story is also fascinating. The last conversation is Nick asking if pregnancies usually go this way (they don't), if men and women usually kill themselves ("not very many" and "hardly ever"), and Nick asking if death is easy (which his father thinks is "pretty easy"). It's a very almost childlike conversation of questions that the father with relatively short answers. Neither person seems to treat what just happened with any real weight. Neither are thinking about it much anymore. Then in the last line, Nick ends with that he "felt quite sure he would never die"? What is the connotation of this? It could simply be a childlike innocence, though we don't exactly know Nick's age. It could also be related to the protection of his father. It could even be related somehow to the idea that he will never have children, if that is presented as the reason the husband killed himself. I'm pretty sure this line is often pointed to when people look at Hemingway's works for signs that he was going to kill himself later in life.

If anyone has anything to add or anything to read that would be enlightening, that would be much appreciated.