Chapter 1

In some stories Nick Adams appears to be but an observer of events which have little to do with him. But everything seems to happen when Nick is around. READ THE TWO SUMMARIES OF " INDIAN CAMP", SAY WHICH OF THEM RELATES THE IMPACT OF THE EVENTS UPON THE BOY BETTER, & MAKE UP YOUR OWN VERSION WITH THIS AIM IN VIEW.

a)" INDIAN CAMP" tells about a doctor, Nick's father, who has to deliver an Indian woman of a baby by Caesarian section, with a jack-knife and without anaesthetic. The woman's invalid husband lies in a bunk above the screaming wife. Nick - a young boy - holds a basin for his father, and a man and three women hold the mother down until the child is successfully born. When it is over, the doctor looks in the bunk and discovers that the husband, who had been through two days of screaming, had found the operation on his wife more than he could take, and had cut his head nearly off with a razor.

b)" INDIAN CAMP" begins with Nick Adams rowing across a lake to watch his father, a doctor, bring life into the world. This he sees, not childbirth as he would like to believe that it happens, but as it really happens. He also sees something more, the suicide death of the Indian father, who cannot stand the pain of the mother.

3. " CHAPTER 1" also manifests an initiation of the main character to the evil forces of reality. Finding himself under new circumstances, he tries to adjust himself to them and to establish some relations with the world and with the people who surround him. This is the cause for his trying to appear more experienced than he really is. His inexperience is conveyed by the atmosphere Hemingway manages to create both in the story and in the chapter: the dim light of dawn and dusk, the flickering of cigarettes and the kitchen light, the barking of dogs and the sound of artillery...

SPEAK OF THE INTERRELATIONS BETWEEN CHAPTER 1 AND THE STORY " INDIAN CAMP".

CHAPTER 1

Everybody was drunk. The whole battery was drunk going along the road in the dark. We were going to the Champagne. The lieutenant kept riding his horse out into the fields and saying to him: " I am drunk, I tell you, mon vieux. Oh, I am so soused." We went along the road all night in the dark and the adjutant kept riding alongside my kitchen and saying, " You must put it out. It is dangerous. It will be observed." We were fifty kilometres from the front but the adjutant worried about the fire in my kitchen. It was funny going along that road. That was when I was a kitchen corporal.

4. Hemingway's achievement lies in the manner in which he renders his themes: through sensory detail that brings the physical world to the reader with lyrical freshness, through dialogue that is as suggestive as his sensory detail, through the slow building of his dramatic fires into an explosive flame. Hemingway once said that the greatest problem of writing was " to put down what really happened in action, what the actual things were that produced the emotion which you experienced.