Hemingway Marxist Analysis

Do you feel it is right that an individual's role in society is determined by their place in a social hierarchy? Karl Marx believes strongly in this through his idea of the Marxian class theory, which is a type of critical lens. A critical lens is a method used by critics to analyze literature. A critical lens draws focus to certain aspects of a text by providing readers with a perspective from which to view the story. “All That Rises Must Converge”, by Flannery O’Connor, “Indian Camp”, and “Hills Like White Elephants”, by Ernest Hemingway, are similar in which each short story can be examined through a Marxist lens. The Marxist theory is often used through the belief that an ideology is a body of ideas that defend the status quo. The Marxist …show more content…
“Indian Camp” is one short story written by Ernest Hemingway that displays a dominant group and a group of wage-workers. In the story, Nick's father, a country doctor, has been summoned to an Indian camp to deliver a pregnant woman of her baby. Nick, his father, and Uncle George hopped in a rowboat to head over to the Indian camp. “Uncle George sat in the stern of the camp rowboat” (Hemingway) as a young Indian row him, exposing the Indians to be the proletariats and Nick, his father, and Uncle George to be the bourgeoisie. At the camp, there were “lights of shanties and wooden bunks” (Hemingway), showing the poverty at the Indian camp. When they went inside the young Indian woman's shack, Nick's father is forced to perform an emergency caesarean section using a jackknife. Nick's father operates without anaesthetic, so the Indian woman is in a tremendous amount of pain. Going to the Indian camp and performing a caesarean section without an anesthetic shows how little Nick's father cared about the health and well being of the Indian woman. When Nick's father asked how he liked being an intern, “Nick said, “All Right.” He was looking away so as not to see what his father was doing” (Hemingway). This surgery caused Nick to gain a new view of his father and uninterest him in following his father's footsteps in becoming a …show more content…
As they wait for the train, they have a couple of beers and she tells the man the hills look like white elephants but the man disagrees. The more beers they have, the American man mentions he wants the woman to have an abortion. He argues that “it’s really an awfully simple operation” and “its not really an operation at all” (Hemingway). The woman disagrees with the abortion and the man says, “if you don't want to you don't have to. I wouldn't have you do it if you didn't want to. But I know it's perfectly simple” (Hemingway), and he tells her they will be happier after the operation. In this story, the white hills symbolize what no one wants, which in this case is the woman's baby. After discussing the operation, the woman looks back at the hills and makes a remark about how the hills no longer look like white elephants which symbolizes that she wants to keep the baby after all. Finally, the woman agrees to the abortion because he told her they will get married if she gets the operation. She tells the man “I don't care about me” (Hemingway). This shows how the Spanish woman no longer cares about her or her beliefs and has to do what the American man wants because he has all the social power throughout the story. By giving the man all the power in the story and agreeing with him to have the abortion, she is removing all