TEXT ANALYSIS
INDIAN CAMP
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Few writers have lived as colorfully as Ernest Hemingway, whose career could have come out of one his adventurous novels. Like Fitzgerald, Dreiser and many other fine novelists of the 20th century, Hemingway spent childhood vocations in Michigan on hunting and fishing trips.
After his novel “The Sun Also Rises” (1926) brought him fame, he covered the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the fighting in China in the 1940s. On a safari in Africa he was badly injured when his small plane crashed; still he continued to enjoy hunting and sport fishing, activities that inspired some of his best works. “The Old Man And The Sea” (1952), a short poetic novel about a poor, old fisherman who heroically catches a huge fish devoured by sharks, won him the Nobel Prize. Discouraged by a troubled family background, illness and the belief that he was losing his gift for writing, Hemingway shot himself to death in !961.
His hallmark is a clean style devoid of unnecessary words. Often he uses understatement: In “A Farewell to Arms” (1929) the heroine dies in childbirth saying “I am not a bit afraid. It’s just a dirty trick.” He once compared his writing to icebergs: “There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows.”
His fine ear for dialogue and exact description shows in his excellent stories, such as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”. Critical opinion generally holds his short stories equal or superior to his novels. His best novels include “The Sun Also Rises”, about the demoralized life of expatriates after World War I; “A Farewell to Arms”, about the tragic love affair of an American soldier and an English nurse during the war; “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940), set during the Spanish Civil War; and “The Old Man And The Sea.”
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... code, above all else courage, is shown in Hemingways short story, The Undefeated. In The Undefeated, Manuel, even at his ... for your life every night that you are fighting the war. Hemingway put little stock in such things. Have you ever seen ... hunting or War. He also had themes of bullfighting, which were influenced by his many visits to bullfight in Spain. Hemingways other ...
Indian Camp is one of Hemingway’s early short stories. It was published together with thirteen others in his first collection of short stories In Our Time in 1924. It bears all the marks of Hemingway’s individual style: skilful use of detail, implication, dialogue.
To make his narration laconic and terse Hemingway makes a practice of “beginning from the middle”, i.e., he begins the story so, as if something had already been said about the described events. In this text the very first line demonstrates this method: ‘another boat’
could appear only if ‘the first’ had been mentioned. Its single appearance does not exclude the necessity of having ‘the first boat’ mentioned but leaves this first boat in implication; thus receiving ‘another boat’ we take it for granted that the first one had already been spoken about.
The same concerns the definite article at the beginning of the second sentence. It could appear in this position also only if the same two Indians had at least once been referred to before. This direct reference in the text is absent, but we very naturally take it into consideration, for all our previous experience has taught us this simple rule: if the subject group is supplied with the definite article, it is not the first time it is mentioned in the narration.
So the first small paragraph consisting of two simple sentences proves to carry much more information than is outwardly expressed. Each. sentence is loaded with additional, implied significance.
In the second paragraph we are given two more details burdened with implication: ‘the camp rowboat’ shows that the first, ‘unmentioned boat of the beginning belonged to this side of the lake. Its permanent presence on the lake shore is so familiar to the narrator that he is concerned only with ‘another boat’, which is ‘the camp boat’.
The Term Paper on Hemingway Indian Camp
Ernest Hemingway pulled from his past present experiences to develop his own thoughts concerning death, relationships, and lies. He then mixed these ideas, along with a familiar setting, to create a masterpiece. One such masterpiece written early in Hemingway's career is the short story, "Indian Camp."Indian Camp" was originally published in the collection of "in Our Time" in 1925. A brief summary ...
‘Uncle George’ as the name of a personage can be accounted by the extreme youth of the narrator. This is the first indication of the age of the narrator.
We learn the name of the narrator from the third paragraph. Nick’s age is never mentioned. We may guess it from indirect hints: ‘Nick lay back with his father’s arm around him’ is not enough yet an indication to the age of the son, because this gesture may signify comradeship, intimacy, etc. But the very next sentence gives an explanation: ‘It was cold on the water’, and father was shielding his little boy from cold. So Nick is a little boy, hence – the vocabulary his father uses in his effort to explain the facts of life to his son. Hence – the interest of the boy in the outward details of their journey – which boat was the first and which the second, his inability to evaluate the distance between the two and a rather vague indication that the first boat was ‘quite a way ahead of them’. It is necessary to note here that the impression of considerable distance is created by the word ‘quite’ which, without concretizing the absolutely indefinite ‘a way ahead’, at least suggests the
general characteristics of the distance. (For example, let’s compare it with such colloquial phrases as ‘quite some time,’ ‘quite a grown up’, ‘quite a show’, where ‘quite’ shows not the completion, but a higher degree of quality, evaluation, emotion, etc.).
In the middle of the same third paragraph there are two attributes, generally rare in Hemingway’s early prose. Pay attention to their character: ‘quick choppy strokes’ do not so much convey the author’s attitude to the described phenomenon, which is the main characteristic feature of epithets, but rather manage to create a picture through a very economically used vivid detail.
Not often does Hemingway resort to Past Continuous, preferring Past Indefinite even in cases when grammar textbooks rigorously demand Past Continuous. But when he employs the tense he fully utilizes its grammatical meaning of a lengthy action in process: ‘The Indian who was rowing them was working very hard’ emphasizes the fact of unabating efforts of the Indian and enhances the atmosphere of tenseness and hurry, hinted at by several preceding details: ‘started off in the dark’, ‘quick strokes’, etc.
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Persuasive Essay Template Name _Shelby Sport_______________________________________________________ Paragraph 1–Introduction: HOOK: Capture your reader’s attention (use a “hook”); introduce general topic—(Beliefs) and then narrow to subject of paper; provide background information on topic and/or materials to be considered (e.g., title/author of book(s), time period of study, experiment ...
From the next, fourth paragraph, we gather further information about Nick’s age and his relations with father. The boy addresses his father in a colloquially-intimate way ‘dad’; the latter explains the aim of the journey in a manner used with children: without terms, specifications, etc. More than that, the very choice of the word ‘lady’ to designate the sick Indian woman is also indicative of the extreme youth of the boy, because it is by little children (and adults in conversation with them) that all females are called ‘ladies’ regardless of their age, social and professional standing, etc.
The fifth paragraph consists of 4 simple sentences, each one presenting a successive step in a series of actions. Every sentence expresses one action of one person.
Mark the word ‘beached’, finishing the first sentence; whenever Hemingway has the alternative between a prepositional phrase (‘on the beach’) and a verbal one he gives a marked preference to the latter, again employing the implication of action suggested by verbal forms: ‘beached’ is definitely a result of action and implies certain effort to achieve it, while the prepositional phrase merely indicates the place without that concealed allusion to the
work preceding it. The appearance of a prepositional phrase in the third sentence is explained by the fact that here the action is expressed by the predicate while in the first case the predicate was already linked with another action, and the syntactical scheme, chosen by the writer for this particular paragraph, did not allow two verbs.
In the same paragraph we again see the colloquial vague reference to the distance (‘way up’) of which we spoke in the commentary to paragraph three.
The sixth and seventh paragraphs continue meticulous registration of every step in the outward development of events. The author’s desire to present them as a single picture, to collect them in one elaborated unity is syntactically expressed in the choice of one verbal tense for all the predicates: even in those cases when grammar rules demand Past Perfect (‘the timber was cut away’) or Past- Continuous (‘an old woman stood’, ‘who carried a lantern’, etc.).
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Such a preference for a grammatical form or category is generally characteristic of Hemingway and is always employed to sustain the effect of oneness, of unity of the described events. In addition to the effect of unity, repeated usage of the same form creates a definite rhythmic effect, thus enhancing the expressive force of the narration.
When the indication at the duration of the action becomes as important as the indication at the fact of the action itself, Hemingway, hot to destroy the syntactical structure of the paragraph, resorts to participial constructions: ‘came out barking’; ‘stood holding’, ‘walked following’, etc., where the ‘-ing’-form of the second element implies that the first one also expresses a process.
The sixth paragraph again demonstrates Hemingway’s skilful usage of detail. We remember that the boats ‘started off in the dark’. The only suggestion as to the possible time of night was given by the reference to the mist, which is known to appear on the lake close to dawn. In the second line of the sixth paragraph we are sure that dawn is near, because ‘a meadow was soaking wet with dew’. And still further on ‘the Indian blew out his lantern’ shows that dawn has come, but only just, because in the next, the seventh paragraph, lights are still burning in the shanties: it is always darker inside than outside, especially with inadequate windows of Indian cabins.
This (the sixth) paragraph also reveals another characteristic feature of Hemingway’s writing: abundance of prepositions and adverbs to show the exact direction of the action: ‘walked up from the beach through a meadow’, ‘ran back into the woods’, etc. All in all in this paragraph we find 14 of them, with the total number of words 80, which makes 17.5 per cent of the paragraph and is quite impressive.
The seventh paragraph closes the first part of the story. We are briefly acquainted with the place and time of action and characters (not through the author’s introduction, but indirectly, through hints and implication) and we know very vaguely the purpose of their journey which brought them to the doorway of an Indian shantie.
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The second part also begins as if it were not “the very beginning”, because we left the characters outside and now “the inside” part is given without any link between the two (e. g., the writer did not tell us that they had gone in, we understand it ourselves from the very first word ‘inside’, from the change of the rhythm, grammatical tense, etc).
Paragraph eight masterfully presents the atmosphere of the shanty and the history of the sick woman. Again mainly short simple sentences, each carrying one concrete observation of Nick constitute the paragraph. Here it is also necessary to mark the time of definite actions and their duration, because the indication at the length and duration of the woman’s sufferings and the help of other women of the camp is as important as the mere denomination of both processes. Hence—the Past Perfect Continuous of ‘to try to have a baby’ and ‘to help’. It is also important for a better explanation of the future outcome to make a point of the fact that the husband had cut his foot still before his wife began her painful delivery, so that he could not shut out her screams and was practically forced to go through his wife’s tortures. Hence—the Past Perfect of “to cut” and meticulous count of days: ‘he had cut his foot three days ago’, ‘she had been trying … for two days’.
Pay attention to the unemotional tone of the narration. There are exceptionally few attributes and adverbial modifiers of manner and none of them express the author’s attitude to the events described: it is ‘a young woman’, ‘old woman’, ‘lower bunk’, ‘upper bunk’. When some evaluation of the proceedings is required the writer selects the least original, the most hackneyed and, consequently, almost devoid of emotive meaning intensifier “very” and uses it thrice ‘very big’, ‘very badly’ and ‘very bad’. “Bad”, very much like “very”, through constant usage, practically lost its individual emotive character and became merely a very general and vague negative characteristic. This last fact of using words of extended, general semantics to be specified only in some definite context characterizes colloquial speech and may be considered one of its norms. Compare, how often in informal speech we use “thing”, “matter”, “to fix”, “to get”, etc., not bothering to find a more exact word to convey our idea, because we are sure that the context, the situation, the tone will help to add the missing characteristics and to complete the necessary effect. Hemingway’s prose is always close to colloquial norms, hence – “very” and “bad” used to denote various shades of feeling and meaning.
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Still another feature of colloquial style favoured by Hemingway, is represented in this paragraph by a somewhat loose word-order, when the sentence begins with a secondary member which is thus emphasized, and prolongs its inversion into the subject-predicate group: .. .lay a young woman’,’.. .was her husband’.
Paragraph nine explains to us the reason for Nick’s accompanying his father to the Indian camp: the doctor wants to initiate his son into the realities of life. Look, how carefully and simply he tries to explain to the boy the complexities of the process of childbirth. He explains first the facts which might have been noticed by the boy and misunderstood: the screams, the necessity of an operation. In his conversation with Nick he uses a medical term once (paragraph 10), when, as the answer to the boy’s question the meaning of the word ‘anaesthetic’ can be understood correctly due to the context, and the second time, later, in paragraph 15 when again, the word ‘incision’ immediately follows ‘to sew up’ as its direct object, so that the meaning of the verb clarifies the meaning of the term quite sufficiently.
On the other hand, when the doctor talks to Uncle George, his vocabulary and syntax change markedly: while his wish to be understood by the boy makes him avoid terms and “difficult” words, and adhere to lucid complete structures, in the conversation with a grown up person
he is not a lecturer but a mere interlocutor. Hence – tree usage of terms (‘peroxide’ – paragraph 16, ‘Cesarian’, ‘nine-foot, tapered gut leaders’ – paragraph 19), colloquial ellipses (paragraphs 19, 20), emotionally coloured words (paragraphs 19, 20), etc.
In the central part of the story – the operation and events immediately preceding and following it – the identity of the narrator is most clearly indicated.
Nick’s unsophistication and ignorance make him a keen though a non-understanding observer, who is fully aware of all the proceedings without grasping their meaning or purpose. And again such words as ‘he put several things’ (paragraph 11) or ‘he put something…’ (paragraph 14) register facts without analyzing them.
In paragraph ten we notice one more indirect hint at the tenderness and understanding between father and son: it is the diminutive form of ‘Daddy’, used by Nick, and the seeming lack of Logic in his father’s answer ‘But they are unimportant’. The boy did not ask about the meaning of the screams but he was excited when he mentioned the word: the sentence in which Nick used the word ‘screams’, begins with an interjection which is always a signal of accumulating emotion. And his father, receiving this signal, abates the boy’s natural sympathy with suffering by his explanation.
Paragraph 12 is mainly continuing the explanations of Nick’s father and it concludes the second step in the development of the story, which began in paragraph 8 with the world ‘inside’. The place of action is complete, the characters are introduced, and we are taken into part three— the culmination of the story—very much in the manner we • were transferred from part one to part two—as it jumping over a gap and landing right in the middle of events of part three, i. e. the process of medical examination and the decision to operate are left in implication and are easily reconstructed from the very first words of paragraph 13-— ‘when he started to operate’.
It is interesting to note how the attention and interest of Nick waver and disappear: all the preceding paragraphs, paragraph 13 included, demonstrated his acute observation of and minute attention to the stages and details of this adventure. But as soon as all the characters stop their outward activities and the action drifts into the deeper spheres, where mere observation is neither sufficient nor interesting, where it is absolutely necessary to put meaning into fact, Nick’s mood and attitude change.
Hemingway indicates this change at the very end of paragraph 13: ‘It all took a long time’—it is an observation of a bored and tired person and it ushers us into paragraphs 14 and 15 which are devoted to the operation itself. Hemingway persistently stresses the fact that Nick is no more interested—he is too small to understand and appreciate the proceedings of his father. So, the same idea is repeated several times: ‘He was looking away … didn’t look … did not watch’, the tense of the last predicate of paragraph 15 also is encumbered with the same idea of time ‘had been gone and at last the finishing words of the paragraph repeat the introduction: ‘.. .a long time’. Thus this episode is put into framing, formed by the repeated syntagma which marks the beginning and the end of the unique operation that affected all the participants so differently. Throughout the operation (paragraphs 14, 15) we meet only father and son, where father proceeds with his task’ of instructor while son proves to be a yet inadequate disciple. Though the positive results of the operation will be stated much later (paragraphs 18, 19), now from the remarks of the doctor we may grasp that everything is going much to his satisfaction: compare his volubility, his colloquial formulas ‘See’, ‘There’, ‘As you like’, his jocular address to Nick—’How do you like…’, the satisfied comment on his own ward ‘That gets it’ with the word of wide semantics, and Nick’s only remark, his laconic answer to father’s direct question. Thus merely through unequal distribution of dialogue Hemingway creates additional information which concerns both -the logical and the emotive sides of the narration.
Paragraphs 14 and 15, when compared to the preceding and following ones, look like film-stills stopped for minute observation. But in paragraph 16 everything once again comes to life, everybody is again moving, doing something, and Nick revives from his stupour. It is immediately reflected in the syntax of the text: paragraph 16 consists of 5 sentences, each of which marks one stage of action, all of them embracing the characters’ reaction and behaviour immediately after the tenseness is gone. Pay attention to the only epithet of the paragraph. Hemingway’s epithets seldom merely indicate the author’s (or character’s) evaluation of the phenomenon, but as a rule offer some additional information, which is demonstrated in this particular case: ‘reminiscently’, reviving the episode of his injury, serves as a link between Uncle George’s look at his arm and the ensuing words of the doctor.
In paragraph 17 once more should be noted the use of Past Perfect Tense in which its grammatical meaning of precedence before another action is not only fully employed, but also made the leading characteristic of the verb, thus participating in the formation of its contextual lexical meaning.
Another point worth mentioning is one of Hemingway’s favourites—word of extremely wide semantics – ‘anything’. The word embraces the whole situation, its realization completely depends upon the context, and this contextual concreteness of an otherwise semantically vaguely outlined word, which enables the speaker to use it in unlimited number of situations and makes it a characteristic lexical unit of oral speech, creates or enhances the colloquial character of Hemingway’s narration. Though the narration is not conducted in the first person singular, we realize from various hints (mentioned above) that it is Nick through whose eyes we are observing events. This type of presenting a picture of life as if perceived by a character creates the so-called effect of immediate presence, which in classical Latin rhetorical books was called the ad oculos effect.
In paragraphs 18, 19 we obtain further implied characteristics of the doctor and Uncle George: though the operation is over and the nurse is expected, Nick’s father still feels responsible for his patient; hence, the all-embracing pronoun: ‘we need’. Uncle George, on the other hand, is concerned only about his bitten arm, and the writer again mentions the fact: ‘was … standing, looking at his arm’. (Compare with paragraph 16).
This time, as in several previously discussed instances the grammatical meaning of the Past Continuous Tense is used to stress the continuity of the process without any specially employed extra lexical units, which creates additional information and becomes one of the sources of laconism and terseness, so characteristic of Hemingway’s individual style.
Uncle George is so preoccupied with his own person, that he can’t appreciate the medical exploit to which he was a witness and he is ironic about the natural exultation of his brother-in-law: the conversational and condescending ‘all right’ warns the reader against attaching an undue importance to ‘a great man’, and ‘great’ acquires a contextual meaning if not completely opposite to its logical meaning, then, at least, much differing from it.
At the beginning of paragraph 19 we find not an implied but a directly given description of the state of his character. Such an explicit evaluation of actions or feelings of characters can be found in Hemingway’s fiction but rarely:
in our story we have it just this once. To make it more vivid and concrete the author resorts to a simile. Simile is one of those stylistic devices which can be, though not often, observed in Hemingway’s creative prose. As a rule, compared objects do not belong to greatly varying classes, most often comparison involves natural phenomena— sounds, shapes, colours of animals, trees, running water, etc. In this case compared objects stand so close to one another that the effect of a simile is sustained not merely by the fact of one object being likened to another, but by the fact that the other is presented in a developed manner: ‘football players’ are mentioned in special circumstances in a definite place, they make a picture, and it is the completed picture that brings forth associations, indispensable for the creation of a vivid simile.
Paragraph 20 begins in the same light conversational elliptical manner in which the short dialogue of paragraph 19 was rendered. ‘Doing Cesarian’, ‘That’s one for the’, and ‘Ought to have a look’ do not differ from one another in structure or colouring. The effect of casualness, lightheartedness is carried on further by the jocular periphrasis ‘these little affairs’ or the sympathetically-ironical epithets ‘the worst sufferers’ and ‘the proud father’. And when after the tenseness of the operation, the reader is soothed by the tone and ordinariness of the conversation, and is in no way prepared for any dramatic events, the blow comes, much stronger for its unexpectedness.
The tragic culmination of the story is the more striking for the almost casual way of the presentation of the event: the narrator with his reactions and emotions is completely eliminated and a dispassionate observer and registrar takes his place – sentences are neat and rounded, no ellipsis, no complex structures, every subject is duly followed by predicate and one or two adverbial modifiers or objects, no attributes, for this is no description, but enumeration of series of successive minute actions. All emphasis has been consciously removed both from the structure and from the semantics of the employed units – strictly neutral layer of words, without any transference of meaning or special contextual effects, is employed. And it is this incongruity between the fact and its presentation (between content and meaning, by the terminology of L. Antal) that brings forth the main impression – the impression of incongruity of cause and result, of the absurdity of this death, of the minuteness of the demarcation line separating life from death.
The event is ugly, brutal, and totally unexpected (paragraph 21).
Hence – the absence of comment on the part of its participants, who have been dumbfounded into speechlessness. So it is no chance distribution of material that the only remark offered in place of all comment is that of the doctor, which is not referred to the accident proper but to its possible after-effects. Again, implicitly we are given another touch to add to his general positive characteristics: his first impulse is to shield the child from the unnecessary experience – childbirth, though painful, is natural and so is not to be shunned or misunderstood, while this death is unnatural and is likely to produce the unwanted impression on the immature mind.
The same tenderness and care is once more stressed by the writer in paragraph 22, in the diminutive form of the boy’s name. ‘Nickie’ compared with ‘Nick’ shows that besides the nominal meaning the derived word has acquired emotive meaning too. “The diminutive suffix conveys the emotive attitude of the speaker towards the object he names. We have already seen the doctor excited, but his excitement was caused by his own success, it bore, as it were, professional character, while here, in paragraph 22, his excitement is concentrated upon his dearest possession – his son; and the fact is reflected in the manner of his conversation. Here we also see two epithets – ‘awful’ and ‘terribly’. Neither of them is used in its original direct meaning and both are colloquial formulas showing the overflow of emotions, of any emotions, both positive and negative (‘terribly happy,’ ‘awfully glad’, etc.).
Thus with the introduction of these epithets Hemingway does not break his artistic rules – he does not evaluate anything, trying to influence his readers by his own estimations;
these words are Signals, which indicate the state of the speaker.
The next passage consists of dialogue, which is extremely interesting both in structure and essence (paragraphs23,24).
We see how carefully and subtly Hemingway tries to make us witnesses of the laborious mental process by which Nick wants to explain to himself the fact of death – he understands that the two events – the birth of the baby and the death of the father – are somehow connected, and his first question, referred to the cause of the disaster, shows this understanding. But besides his natural desire to have everything he saw explained, we see how a perception leads to generalization, how from this particular night Nick’s concept of death is gradually forming, and the effort to grasp the meaning of death grows into a fixed idea in his flow of thought, it never leaves him (see the final line of the story), though in the concluding paragraph he again presents to us a series of successive actions. This idea is like an undercurrent undisturbed by the water running above – the picture of the peaceful lake, with the rising sun above, the fixed idea underneath, and it is only in the very final sentence that it comes out onto the surface, flows into the outer perceptions and in combination with them, the concluding triumphant decision is formed, optimistic in spite of the sordidness of the circumstances under which it has taken shape. Thus the peaceful picture of dawn which first is given as a sharp contrast to the events that have just taken place, proves to be active, for it influences the intensity of the boy’s thinking, enables him to come to his optimistic conclusion.
The formal structure of the dialogue in paragraph 23 is typical for Hemingway. The writer subtly reflects the norms of colloquial speech in all its peculiarities – syntax (ellipsis, short sentences, question – answer pattern), vocabulary (set expressions, words of wide semantics, frequent repetitions), grammar (contracted verbal forms, preference for “simple” tenses).
They allow him to create the effect of naturalness of the conversation and the authenticity of his characters, the reality of their lives, hopes and aspirations. Thus, though we have practically no direct references to characterize Nick or his father, we get their true-to-life portraits in the indirect, implied manner.
This type of characteristics of personages, places and events is one of the leading features of Hemingway’s individual style, while Indian Camp as a complete and perfectly balanced entity reflects the main properties of Hemingway’s creative prose in the domain of themes, ideas and mode of writing.
