ocking and horrible. And this fear and attempt to hide pain associated with wartime memories can be traced throughout the Nick Adams Stories and the two stories we will treat here, “Indian Camp” and “Big Two-Hearted River.”
“Indian Camp,” though it records an episode in the boyhood of Nick, develops the themes that dominate A Farewell to Arms, birth and death and the ever present presence of the looming force of nada. The young Nick Adams in “Indian Camp” is introduced to the tensions and fears that confront the Hemingway hero. Typically, the Hemingway hero is wounded either physically or psychologically and as a result of this wounding, the Hemingway hero will quite frequently break from society. Nick’s initiation into the war brings him face to face with what might previously have been an unnamable fear, the reality of life and death, the knowledge of which is attained and then suppressed by the young Nick in “Indian Camp.”
“Indian Camp” and “Big Two-Hearted River” expose and confront the problem of the fear that resides beneath the surface of Nick Adams. It is very simply the fear of death, the fear of nothingness or the fear of nada. In the first story Nick ignores this fear, he believes he is not part of the cycle of life and death. But the post-war Nick, represented in “Big Two-Hearted River” attempts to come to terms with the great fear. As we can see in these two stories, the war plays a big part. The tensions and fears introduced to the young Nick in “Indian Camp” are the same tensions and fears that are effects of the war. The war for Hemingway’s two heroes, Nick Adams and Frederic Henry, is the place where the great fear of nothingness, of death, of nada presents itself and is exposed. After the war, Nick knows he must confront the fears that lie below the surface of everyday life.
In “Indian Camp” the Hemingway reader is introduced to all of the importan...