How does Nick lose his innocence in Hemingway's "Indian Camp"?

"Indian Camp" is the first of several short stories by Ernest Hemingway about the character Nick Adams. Nick is basically Hemingway's alter ego and many of the events in the stories are autobiographical. Indian Camp is set in an Indian camp on a unnamed lake which was probably Walloon Lake where the Hemingway family had property. Like Nick's father in the story, Hemingway's father was also a doctor. Other Nick Adams stories are set in the Michigan woods near a lake. 

The young Nick experiences two important events at the Indian camp which take him past innocence. At the start of the story he is pictured in his father's arms as they travel by boat to a camp to help a pregnant woman. Nick and his father are accompanied by his father's friend George. The Indian woman is having a difficult pregnancy and his father says the baby is not coming out head first and, his father says, "When they're not they make a lot of trouble for everybody."

Nick's father has to perform a Caesarian section on the woman with a jack-knife and Nick is witness to the entire operation as he holds the basin full of water where the umbilical cord is eventually placed. It is a scene that most young boys never experience, and Nick is obviously changed after watching the birth of the Indian boy. As the doctor stitches up the woman, Hemingway writes, "Nick did not watch. His curiosity had been gone for a long time." 

The Indian woman's husband has been in the bunk above his wife during the entire procedure and, because of the screaming and length of the ordeal, has committed suicide by slitting his throat with a razor. When Nick asks why the man would do such a thing, his father says, "I don't know Nick. He couldn't stand things, I guess."

So, in this brief story Nick witnesses the messiest of births and messiest of deaths. At the end when they return home on the boat he is no longer in his father's arms but rather, "sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing...quite sure that he would never die."

It's interesting that only four years after the publication of this story Hemingway's father would commit suicide and Hemingway himself took his own life in 1961.

In "Indian Camp" by Ernest Hemingway, how does Nick's visit to the Indian camp change him?

Young Nick Adams grows up quickly over the course of his visit to the eponymous Indian camp. Accompanying his father and his uncle, both of which are doctors, he gets to witness at first hand, for the first time in his short life, the unpleasant realities of life and death.

First of all, he witnesses his father perform a crude cesarean section on an Indian woman using a sterilized pocketknife. The operation is extremely difficult, and it causes the woman considerable pain. Yet Nick remains by his father's side throughout the operation, standing by with a basin of water for what seems like an eternity. For the first time, Nick has gained an understanding of the difficulties of bringing life into the world.

Not long after, he gains a glimpse into human existence at the other end of the scale. Disturbed by the piercing screams of his pregnant wife, the Indian woman's husband goes out of his mind and kills himself by cutting his throat. Unlike the cesarean section, this particular experience is one that Nick's father wants to spare his son. After all, it's not a pretty sight to see the dead man lying there in a pool of blood.

But it's too late; Nick's already seen it. And now that he has seen it, he's full of curiosity about an experience that most children of his age would never see and should never get to see. On the way home, he asks his father all kinds of questions about life and death. Even more significantly, Nick's experiences at the Indian camp have made him feel like he's somehow immortal. This is undoubtedly a consequence of his father's detached attitude toward his patients, an attitude which now appears to have been passed on to his son.

In "Indian Camp" by Ernest Hemingway, how does Nick's visit to the Indian camp change him?

In the short story "Indian Camp" by Ernest Hemingway, Nick Adams accompanies his uncle George and his father, who is a doctor, to an enclave of Native Americans where a woman has been in painful labor for two days. Nick's father has to deliver the baby with a jackknife and sew up the incision with fishing line, all without the use of anesthetic. During the operation, the husband of the woman, who has been lying on the top bunk because his foot is wounded, commits suicide by slitting his throat with a razor. Evidently, he had not been able to endure his wife's screams.

Nick witnesses the rough surgery, although he turns his head away for part of it, and after it is over he also sees that the husband has cut his throat, although his father tries to shield him from it.

This story is an example of a "rite of passage" or "initiation" story in which a character transitions from child to adult. There are indications in the story that Nick makes this change. In the beginning, he is curious and watches what his father is doing, but by the time his father is applying the makeshift stitches, Nick's curiosity has gone, and he doesn't want to watch anymore. As they approach the Indian camp, his father has his arm around Nick, protecting him as a parent would protect a child, but when they leave the camp, Nick sits by himself in the stern of the boat. At the end, Nick asks his father somber questions about suicide and death, and then he becomes certain that he will never die. He is hardening his spirit to the reality of death, a stark reality that this experience has shown him for the first time.

We see, then, that Nick undergoes a profound change through the incident at the Indian camp. He effectively loses his childhood and begins to react to situations as an adult.