Abstract This article places Ernest Hemingway’s Indian Camp alongside Su Shi’s Ding Feng Bo to examine how different structures of silence shape clinical meaning. Indian Camp presents an avoidant silence characterized by a “cannot speak” structure, expressed through the collapse of language, relational alienation, and repression produced by institutional norms, gender expectations, and Hemingway’s iceberg aesthetic. In contrast, Ding Feng B o offers a cultivated silence grounded in a deliberate “will not speak” stance, marked by restraint and self-regulation associated with li (礼) , yi (义), and he (和). Together, the texts highlight that silence may signal emotional overload or serve as a psychological and ethical resource in clinical care. This comparison underscores the importance of recognizing multiple forms of silence as a clinical competence and suggests that cultivated silence can help Western medicine better balance truthful disclosure with the sustaining of hope.
Lin Yuan (Thu,) studied this question.