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Hills Like White Elephants Rhetorical Analysis Essay

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The man violates both the Maxim of Quality and Maxim of Quantity: he says what is not true, and he repeats the same sense three times. By saying he respects the girl’s choice as well as the operation is really simple, he is expressing the idea that he cares about her, but since the operation is so simple and safe that nothing needs to worry about, he wants her to do it. He is trying to win the girl’s trust so that she will agree to have an abortion. But his words are feeble, only making the girl angry at him. Therefore, in the seventh part the girl keeps asking whether the man will love her or he really wants to do so. The man’s answer disappoints her: Continuous questions are the feature of the girl’s utterances, reflecting her distrust …show more content…

In fictions there are two levels of interaction. The lower level of interaction is the one between characters, where messages can be passed to either direction, while the higher level is the interaction between the author and the reader, where the passage of message is one-way (Leech & Michael, 2001: 253). Making use of interaction between characters, the author realizes the interaction with readers. In Hills like White Elephants, Hemingway creates implicature on the lower level through characters’ violations of Maxims of the Cooperative Principle. The implicature can be sensed fully by readers on the higher level, providing room for Hemingway to omit things and give a full play of the Iceberg Theory. As a pivotal part in pragmatics approach, Conversational Implicature Theory helps readers to have a deeper understanding of the literary effects and artistic value in the fiction Hills like White Elephants, as well as explain how Iceberg Theory works in it. Since Hemingway allows readers plenty of room for imagination, interpretations of Hills like White Elephants are diverse. The one above is one possible interpretation among

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Hemingway accomplishes that outcome by making use of his iceberg theory - the ability to omit as much as possible from the context and interpretation of the story, leaving the reader to intuit its entire meaning.

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