be problematic because the suicide occurs at the moment the screams are silenced. He points to Hemingway's statement in Death in the Afternoon, "if two people love each other there can be no happy end to it," as evidence that the husband may have killed himself because he is "driven frantic by his wife's pain, and perhaps his own." The story also shows the innocence of childhood; Nick Adams believes he will live forever and be a child forever; he is a character who sees his life "stretching ahead." At the end of the story, in the boat with his father, Nick denies death when he says he will never die. "Indian Camp" shows Hemingway's early fascination with suicide and with the conflict between fathers and sons. Young thinks there is an unavoidable focus on the fact that the two people the principal characters are based on—the father, Clarence Hemingway, and the boy, Ernest Hemingway—end up committing suicide. Kenneth Lynn writes that the irony to modern readers is that both characters in "that boat on the lake would one day do away with themselves." Hemingway shot himself on July 2, 1961; his father had shot himself on December 6, 1928. Primitivism, race, and autobiography In his essay "Hemingway's Primitivism and 'Indian camp Jeffrey Meyers writes that Hemingway was very clear about the husband's role, because in this story he was writing about a familiar subject—the experiences of his boyhood in Michigan. The young father's role is to "deflate the doctor," who finds victory in slicing open the woman's belly to deliver the infant, and to provide a counterpoint to the mother's strength and resilience. The father's suicide serves as a symbolic rejection of the white doctor whose skill is necessary, but who brings with him destruction. In her paper "Screaming Through Silence: The Violence of Race in 'Indian Camp,'" Amy Strong writes "Indian Camp" is about domination; the husband kills himself at the moment his wife is cut open by a white doctor. She thinks the theme of domination exists on more than one level: Nick is dominated by his father; the white outsiders dominate in the Indian camp; and the white doctor "has cut into the woman, like the early settlers leaving a gash in the tree." According to Hemingway scholar Thomas Strychacz, in the story Hemingway presents a re-enactment of the arrival of Europeans in the New World