After reading and analyzing the short story “Indian Camp” by Hemingway. One of the most appealing element to me was Hemingway’s narrator style. The story centers around a point of view from young Nick who have never been to an Indian camp. The style of storytelling Hemingway tells us here is through third-person limited omniscient. For example, “Nick watched his father’s hands scrubbing each other with the soap” (17). Here, we have third-person limited omniscient point of view. we don’t get much point of view from the Nick’s perspective. If it’s a first-person point of view from Nick’s then the Author would write something like this, “I watched my father scrubbing his hands each other with the soap”. The style of Hemingway tells us this story is through a very limited perspective. I think the author does not want us to go through all the details of what’s happening next. Hemingway wants to tell the story through his way by using the third-person narration.
“Nick lay back with his father’s arm around him” (16). Hemingway starts out in the second paragraph by telling the story from narrator’s perspective other than nick. This gives us clear clue of how the story structures through nick’s point of view but in very limited way. The limited omniscient really makes this story tedious with not much detail. If Hemingway told this story from a Nick’s third person omniscient for example, “The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making circle…he felt quite sure that he would never die” (19). Then Nick would detail how the sun came up from the hills, how the bass looked when it jumped from the water. There will be a lot of more details in the story that can make this story much more effective and comprehensive for the readers.
I agree that “Indian Camp ,” was very tedious to read, because of the lack of detail. However, i believe Hemingway could have elaborated more on the description of the Indian man within the wooden bunk, who later killed himself, rather than talking about the setting towards the end of the story. Hemingway gave the reader a clear description of the environment Nick and his father were in during the introduction, when they took a cold, misty boat ride across the bay. Leading to a hike across the dark trials. Hemingway however, only gave us a slight insight into the personality of the Indian man within the bunk, by telling us about his injured foot. After the birth of his child the Indian man was found dead in bed with a cut throat from ear to ear. We are left clueless of what happened during the time of birth. Did he kill himself because his wife was in so much pain? Was he afraid of becoming a father? Did he give his life for the birth of his child?
Questions
1. Are we in the era of time when Cristopher Columbus journeyed to America?
2. Who is Uncle George what is role?
3. Who is the story focused on?
I enjoyed the way “Indian Camp” was told. I agree with Tenzin’s point about the very limited third person omniscient view but in my opinion it added to the content of the story. I myself am a lover of short stories that get to the meat of what we are reading about, although the story did not offer much deep meaning behind the story I enjoyed the imagery that was left to my imagination. I found it hard to grab onto a deeper theme than a stranger from a more sophisticated way of living comes to a land where less sophisticated people abide and lives among this new primitive society, this was probably because of the lack of details.
I do notice that Hemmingway describes Indians as more human than those described in “Goodman brown.” In “Goodman Brown” the Indians are more fiendishly portrayed to the point where they come second to the devil in their deviousness as seen on page 23 “Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powow, come devil himself!” Although in “Indian Camp” the doctor almost gets into a physical fight with a brutishly described Indian man named Dick, “Dick was a big man. He knew how big he was. He liked to get into fights.”(pg 25) Both devious in their own way.
I agree that the narration style that Hemingway used was very limited and felt like he used very little detail in this story. You don’t know much about the characters in this story. The only things Hemingway gives us is Nick is a child, his dad is a doctor, and his Uncle George is just Uncle George. We do not know where they came from or who they really are. All we know is that they are here now to help the young Indian woman give birth. Nick’s dad’s name in the story is just Doctor. Makes you wonder why Hemingway didn’t use his actual name like but Uncle George has one. So I agree that Hemingway gave us a very limited point of view not just in the general story but also limiting the information we know about the characters.