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Hemingway's A Clean Well-Lighted Place And Hills Like White Elephants

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A Clean Well-Lighted Place and Hill Like White Elephants beautifully illustrated setting at its best. In a Clean Well-lighted place, the setting is monumentally important due to the fact that it directly correlates to the theme and the fact that Hemingway does not give us much else to work with. Starting the story we find two waiters working late, one old and one young, in a nice, clean, and well-lit café. The author uses the setting throughout the story to elude to the contrasting characteristics of light and dark. The setting divulges deeper into the meaning of light and dark with the theme of loneliness. Loneliness can be found in the unclean, dark places which are expressed by the old waiter and the drunk man. As the story progresses the setting changes from the pleasant café to an unfriendly, lifeless bar that the old waiter spends his night at to attempt to prevent his inevitable loneliness. Overall the setting through the story displays the contrast between light leading to happiness and dark leading to loneliness. …show more content…

The fact that Hemingway places it at a midway point hints at the fact that this is only the beginning of the relationship troubles. The girl in the story says the hills look like white elephants in the beginning of the story, but as the fight between the couple gets more and more heated her view of the hills change. She seems to be torn between the two landscapes that the author painted. This vacillates behavior toward the setting most likely symbolizes her choice to have the operation or to

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Hills Like White Elephants #1 Describe the setting and discuss its importance to the story. •Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is set in a train station to highlight the fact that the relationship between the American and the girl is at a crossroads. Planted in the middle of a valley, the station isn’t the final destination, but merely a stopping point between Barcelona and Madrid. Night

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In the short story “Hills Like White Elephants,” by Ernest Hemingway, there is a relationship unfolding, a complex relationship difficult to understand. The relationship is revealed by a conversation between a man and a woman, a topic of conversation that people rarely discussed in the period that the story was set. After researching interpretations, it is consistently said “She is pregnant, and he wants her to have an abortion” (Weeks 76), to which I agree that this conversation is about abortion. With the man seemingly pushing the topic and the girl hesitant and questionable, it is unsure as to the result of their conversation. However, it is my belief that she chose to follow her heart and not get the abortion.

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The settings authors use for their stories play an important part in short stories by allowing the authors to express various moods, give insights into the thoughts of their characters, and use symbolism through contrasts in the settings. This essay will look at how the settings of "Hills Like White Elephants" and "Sonny's Blues" were used to reflect the characters' conflicts and emotions while also adding atmosphere and depth to the stories. The short story "Hills Like White Elephants," written by Ernest Hemingway, explores the complexities of human connections. This story follows a couple, Jig and "the American," as they face a major life decision: whether or not to have an abortion, which they refer to as an "operation" (Hemingway 701).

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Throughout the short story (1), “Hills Like White Elephants,” Ernest Hemingway is speaking about a seemingly unwanted pregnancy and a woman’s uneasiness with going through an abortion. However, Hemingway never explicitly says in this work of fiction (2) that it is about abortion or that the woman, Jig, is uncomfortable with it, but uses symbolism (3) to present this to the audience. At the time “Hills like White Elephants” was published, in 1927, abortion was illegal in most places and a very taboo subject that wasn’t to be openly discussed in public. Thus, Hemingway relied greatly upon the use of symbolism to get his message across for this reason as well as the third person narrator (4) that did not give insight into the character’s thoughts within this piece of literature (5) . He uses symbols such as the train station, white hills, the baggage, and the drinks to point towards the underlying internal conflict (6) of Jig’s decision that is being heavily influenced by the American man, who wants Jig to get the abortion.

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Nevertheless, Ernest Hemingway soon shows that this relationship contains a rift. This becomes apparent once they try conversing to one another. The girl attempts to spark a conversation by mentioning that the hills look like white elephants, but this topic soon turns hostile with the American’s replies. How this conversation is handled already shows that the couple “are trapped in a state of imbalance and disagreement” from the beginning (Link). The problem with the conversation is that the American’s personality of being simple and serious.

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They each bring up different points as to why throughout the story. In Earnest Hemingway’s short story Hills like White Elephants written in 1927 he uses the hills themselves, the scenery that the couple is surrounded by, and the beaded curtain as symbols to describe the situation that the couple faces. In this short story, the hills that the train station overlook are compared to white elephants. This is because the conversation Jig is wanting to have with the American consists of whether or not to keep the

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Relationships are the core of everything we do in life. We love someone, so we do something for them; we value someone 's opinion, so we respect them; we dislike someone, so we avoid them. Relationships cause people to act on their emotions which impact how and why they do the things they do. Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” is about a couple trying to come to a conclusion on a delicate matter. While the man strongly promotes his opinion the girl is hesitant but wants to do whatever will make him happy.

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(Hemingway 475). When Jig initially tells her thoughts on what the hills remind her of, she is indirectly telling her boyfriend what she is thinking. She, of course, would relate to the hills more than her boyfriend would because they remind her of a pregnant stomach. They boyfriend shows his self-centeredness by his reply. He does not think of the hills in the same way in which Jig does, all he sees are hills that look dry and bland, indirectly showing what he wants.

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In the short story, “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway from the start makes us draw out our own conclusions and does not give us a great deal of information. For example, we are only told about two characters, an American man and a girl who are waiting for their train to arrive. Other than this, we are not told what relationship the characters share together or where their final destination is. The protagonist who is referred to as “the girl” is in the middle of a tragic situation which can take a turn for the best or the worst and her partner, the “American man” is not helping but making the situation more heated.

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The dialogue in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” reveals a man’s and a woman’s incongruent conflict on abortion, and the author’s fundamentally feminist position is visible in the portrayal of the woman’s independent choice of whether or not to keep the baby she is carrying. The plot is very simple in the story which is less than 1500 words long. A woman and a man spend less than an hour on a hot summers day at a Spanish train station in the valley of Ebro as they are waiting for a train heading for Madrid. Their dialogue takes up most of the space and only few major actions take place.

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You know I love you.’”. Both of them are trying to connect with each other so they can figure out the best possible way to deal with the operation. Deborah Tall says, “This etymology resonates tellingly with the story's central circumstance: an unplanned pregnancy, a "gift" that threatens to rupture, to emotionally bankrupt, Hemingway's couple. But the woman specifically applies the metaphor to the landscape--the hills--and thus she implies that the physical world itself is a burden, a gift that overwhelms” ( p. 342). In doing that they create more of a misunderstanding, which leads for the connection that the possibly had to

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Hills Like White Elephant is a short story by Earnest Hemingway from 1927. The story is talking about a failing relationship between an American man and his girlfriend. This couple is at a critical point on their lives. At the bar in a train station in Spain, the girl, Jig, does not want to end up her pregnancy, but she is going to sacrifice the baby to satisfied him. Because he is critical of the exploitation of his girl’s feelings concerning the continuation of unbalanced relationship.

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The main focus of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is on the pain of old age suffered by a man that we meet in a cafe lateone night. Hemingway contrasts light and dark to show the difference between this man and the young people aroundhim, and uses his deafness as an image for his separation from the rest of the world. Near the end of the story, the authorshows us the desperate emptiness of a life near finished without the fruit of its labor, and the aggravation of the old man 'srestless mind that cannot find peace. Throughout this story stark images of desperation show the old man 's life at a pointwhen he has realized the futility of life and finds himself the lonely object of scorn. The most obvious image used by

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During the course of the story “Hills Like White Elephants” the author Ernest Hemingway uses symbolism to describe the the main idea of the girl having the “operation.” Hemingway uses the landscape, the white elephant, and the term “elephant in the room” to represent different aspects of the pregnancy and abortion. The landscape in the story represents choosing the abortion or choosing to keep the baby. The setting of the story is at a train station.

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America is built upon the ideal that every citizen has an equal opportunity to success and prosperity through hard work and dedication. This is also known as the American dream. Many authors have speculated what is most important in grasping the American dream and through reading these stories it can be determined that success, happiness, and freedoms all play an important role in attaining the American dream. The American dream is historically unique because everyone American has the right to it.

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