and the subsequent doctrine of manifest destiny. The white men in the story arrive on the water and are met at a beach by natives. The native husband and father of the baby loses everything, causing him to kill himself: his home is overtaken, and his wife ripped apart. The white doctor tells his son to ignore the woman's screams: "her screams are not important. I don't hear them because they are not important." The doctor's victory is to control nature by delivering a baby, diminished by the father's suicide who through his death symbolically takes back control from the white doctor. Meyers claims the story is not autobiographical though it is an early example of Hemingway's ability to tell stories "true to life." In the story, Nick Adams' father, who is portrayed as "professionally cool," is based on Hemingway's own father, Clarence Hemingway. Hemingway's paternal uncle, George, appears in the story, and is treated unsympathetically. Hannum suggests George may have been the child's father, writing that in the story remains the "never-resolved implication of the paternity of the Indian child." During the surgery the mother bites Uncle George, the Indians laugh at him, and he leaves when the father is found dead. Jackson Benson writes in "Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life" that critics should refrain from finding connections between Hemingway's life and fiction and instead focus on how he uses biographical events to transform life into art. He believes the events in a writer's life have only a vague relationship to the fiction, like a dream from which a drama emerges. Of Hemingway's earliest stories, Benson claims "his early fiction, his best, has often been compared to a compulsive nightmare." In his essay "On Writing," Hemingway wrote that "Indian Camp" was a story in which imaginary events were made to seem real: "Everything good he'd ever written he'd made up . ... Of course he'd never seen an Indian woman having a baby. That was what made it good." Writing style Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker writes that Hemingway learned from his short stories how to "get the most from the least, how to prune language, how to multiply intensities, and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth." The style has is considered exemplary of the iceberg theory, because, as Baker describes it,