Ernest Hemingway Hero Essay

In 1924, commonly accepted as the earliest specimen of Hemingway’s male protagonists, Nick Adams appears as the protagonist in Indian Camp. Nick is a boy just approaching manhood, who’s old enough for his father to be thinking about Nick’s future career yet still young enough to need some nurturing. Hemingway’s earlier writings show this code hero’s sensitivity more openly. Early in this brief story the line, “Nick lay back with his father's arm around him” (E. Hemingway 69), indicates ease with demonstrating a young man can have a warm, comforting relationship with his father.
After Nick and his dad leave the Indian camp, while walking back to the rowboats, the conversation they have is a typical father-son conversation. Nick shows some
They do sometimes.' (Hemingway 71)
Young Nick shows apprehension about the pain of difficult childbirth and of suicide, both are some of the most painful things, psychologically and physically, in the human condition and his dad does his best to reassure him.
As an outlier to the typical code hero filling the role of the central character, in this story it is Uncle George, not the protagonist, who demonstrates disregard and lack of sensitivity. There is an implication that Uncle George is the father of the baby about to be born. “Uncle George was smoking a cigar in the dark. The young Indian pulled the boat way up on the beach. Uncle George gave both the Indians cigars.” (E. Hemingway 69) and yet Uncle George shows disregard and insensitivity to the pain he’s caused in the Indian family.
The last line of the story hints at the immortalness that is part of the Hero’s code. In each of Hemingway’s iterations of the code hero, the characters live with gusto, as though they don’t care about death. “Ultimately, the code hero will lose in his conflict with life because he will die. But all that matters is how one faces death.”(Gillani) The code hero is a man who lives in the moment with no thought to what the future might