Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory - Analysis, Indian Camp | Indian Camp - Summary, Themes & Characters - Novels PDF Download

Medicine

Ever hear someone say "Trust me, I'm a doctor"? Medicine holds a privileged position in our society. It's supposed to be rational, scientific, impartial—even impersonal. It's definitely impersonal in "Indian Camp," where Nick's dad doesn't even seem to care that much about the Indian woman's well-being; sure he operates on her to save her life and the baby's, but he also does so rather callously. "But her screams are not important" (18), he says, paying little attention to her screams or the fact that he doesn't have any anesthetic.

We get a sense of the cold meticulousness of medicine in the description of Dr. Adams washing his hands "very carefully and thoroughly" (21). Nick's dad may be a good doctor (and a sanitary one), but it seems to come at a cost of human empathy. And even though Nick's dad can perform a Caesarian with a jack-knife, he fails to identify or remedy the pain of the suicidal Indian man.

Western Medicine

The idea of Western medicine is also implicit in this story. Western medicine basically refers to medical practices developed primarily in Europe and (post-colonization) North America. If you're picturing a guy in a white lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck jotting down a prescription in barely-legible doctor handwriting, then you're on the right track. Western medicine is often treated as superior to its various counterparts, though these other medical traditions have in many cases been around a good deal longer and often focus their attention on different components of the experience of illness. If you're thinking that Western medicine seems like a racially and culturally loaded term, you are absolutely right. It's an us-versus-them model and, as an idea, it's been circulating for the past few centuries.

Because Nick's father is a white doctor being called into an Indian camp, there is a nod toward the idea that the "Indian" medicine isn't able to resolve the Indian woman's condition, and a wiser and more authoritative figure needs to be brought in. So Nick's dad is in an even more privileged position because of this idea of Western medicine—but again, because Western medicine in the story is so emotionally distant and rational, it has no idea how to react in the face of something as ambiguous and multifaceted as suicide.

Birth

Is this story about a birth or a death? Well, you kind of need the former before you can have the latter. In fact, the figures of birth and death don't really become clear to us until we see them together. Before we get to the husband's suicide in the story, the birth is just a birth. Frankly, the fact that it's a birth as opposed to, say, an infection, or a triple-bypass, or an amputation, doesn't seem to matter all that much until we find the husband dead.

So the first thing we might notice about birth and death is that they seem to be associated with women and men respectively. Symbolically, it seems to make sense that birth would be associated with women, since they, you know, do it. But the symbolism isn't all that clear-cut here. It's not simply as though the woman is creating life: it looks as though the birth might actually kill her, or result in the death of the baby. And afterward, the woman is far from a symbol of life:

She was quiet now and her eyes were closed. She looked very pale. (36)

Awfully corpse-like, don't you think? In a way, this not-so-happy birth foreshadows the revelation of the husband's suicide, because we know that something is not quite right about this scene.

Death

Death really takes over the story after the baby is delivered. Nick's dad's whole intention for the trip—getting his kid to see a live birth, which Nick is reluctant to do—becomes reversed when Nick ends up seeing what his father tries to hide from him. Take a gander at his reactions to first the birth, and then the suicide:

He was looking away so as not to see what his father was doing. (28)

Nick, standing in the door of the kitchen, had a good view of the upper bunk when his father, the lamp in one hand, tipped the Indian's head back. (45)

It's unclear here whether Nick looks at the suicide out of his own desire to see, or whether he accidently happens to get a full-frontal view of it. Given how squeamish Nick is, we can probably assume the latter, though it may be that Nick is more fascinated by the idea of death. We definitely get a sense of this from the awkward father-son talk on the boat ride back, in which Nick's questions are all about death and suicide instead of about the birth he just witnessed.

So death seems to win out in the end, but the question now is why. There isn't a hard, fast answer to this one. Instead, there are a few routes we could take: we could think about not just death, but the idea of suicide and how that corrupts a clean-cut view of the world; we could think about how all people end up contemplating their own mortality, and now Nick has been initiated into that adult world; we could think about how Nick's father is so eager to shield Nick from the suicide, even though he was pretty adamant about him watching the birth. See, death was just the beginning.