An Impressive Performance Mack Hammond College

Sons have long been taking after their fathers. Such is the case in Ernest Hemingway’s 1925 collection of short stories, In Our Time. In the stories, we see that the character of Nick has internalized his father’s traditionally masculine ways of interacting with women, and of suppressing emotion. The foundations for this are laid in chapter 1, “Indian Camp”, through the ordeal that is Nick’s father’s surgical performance, and his stoic and brief answers to the important questions that Nick asks him afterward. We later see some repercussions of these father-son interactions in chapter 3, “The End of Something”, in the form of Nick’s conversations with Marjorie, and his decisions as to their relationship.

Nick is a firsthand witness of his father’s harsh and hyper-masculine operation on the Indian woman in the first chapter. Very quickly we see that Nick is naturally caring and feels concerned for the woman, as he asks his father to “give her something to make her stop screaming” (Hemingway 16). His father coldly replies that he does not hear her screams “because they are not important” (16). His response almost completely shames his son for caring about the woman in labour’s pain, and expresses to Nick that he should not care...