The Horror of Life from Birth to Death
             During the Modernist Movement, existentialist writers wrote about the meaninglessness of life. Existentialists believe that life is a struggle against the nothingness of the world. They believe there is no higher meaning to the existence of man, and they deny the existence of God. Ernest Hemingway portrays three different ways of coping with the meaninglessness of life in his short story "Indian Camp." The three characters that portray the three different outlooks are Nick's father, Uncle George, and the Indian father. Ernest Hemingway uses the environment in his short story "Indian Camp" to develop the thematic vision that there are different ways people can cope with the horror of life from the moment of birth and until death.
             In the short story, Hemmingway portrays a microcosm of life by including a baby's birth and a man's suicide in the short period of the story. The pregnant Indian woman struggles in labor for two days without any medical attention until Nick's father's arrival. Nick's father describes to Uncle George after the procedure, "Doing a Caesarian with a jack-knife and sewing it up with nine-foot, tapered gut leaders" (18). The description of the birth is unnatural and horrible. The grotesque imagery used with the "jack-knife" and fishing line as substitutes to conventional surgical equipment help create a savage environment. The allegorical meaning of the birth is that the beginning of life is horrible.
             Hemmingway also includes a horrible death in the microcosm of life he creates in the short story. The father of the baby stays in the room during the birth. In the end, the horror of the birth is too much for the father to take and he takes his life by slitting his throat from ear to ear. Hemmingway uses grotesque imagery when he says, "The blood had flowed down into a pool where his bod...