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Hills Like White Elephants

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In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants, a story begins of two completely opposite sceneries separated by railroads in between a train station with the sun shining. On one side you have hills in a valley that were long and white. On the other you a plain field with no trees and no shade. The story continues about an American man and a girl sitting on a table in the shadow of a building with bamboo strings in the door to keep the flies out. As the story progresses, a conversation between the two commences. They start to describe the scenery they see. The hills were white in the sun, and the country was brown and dry. The girl says “the hills look like white elephants” (785). The conversation continues and the girl says again, “they’re …show more content…

Hemingway’s setting in the short story is a landscape of two very different kinds of land. On one side, the valley with hills in which when the sun shines on it seems like they are white. On the other side, it is brown and dry and there are no trees nor shade. This represents to me the outcome of the decision that is to be made by the characters. My interpretation of this description is that the “hills like white elephants” indicate that the choice should be to not have the abortion. The hills represent the baby in the mother’s womb and I believe that the girl loves the idea of it because she states that they’re “lovely hills” (786). I feel the author wants the girl to have the child because of that piece of dialogue. The girl also says that “through the trees” were “fields of grains” and a “river” and beyond that was a “mountain” indicating the final months of the pregnancy (787). She also states “we could have all of this” and “we could have everything” but “no we can’t” and “it isn’t ours anymore” and once they take it away, you never get it back” (787). The dialogue and symbolism in this part indicate she wants the baby and thinks it beautiful as the hills. She believes if she has the abortion, her life is going to be brown and dry with no life and no

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The short story "Hills Like White Elephants," is about a couple that is really young and the is having a issue about abortion. The author uses a lot of rhetorical devices to convey his message but mostly use imagery and symbolism. The way that the story is told by the author the reader can see the story told in their head. The way that the author describe the hills and the town that they was in it shows a lot of imagery. The story also picture the couple waiting for the train that they had been waiting for.

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Literary Analysis #2 Hills Like White Elephants This short story by Ernest Hemmingway, is about a man and woman’s difference in opinion with one another. The couple is waiting on a train to arrive at the junction station to take them to Madrid, Spain so that the woman can have an operation. In this story, Hemmingway utilizes symbolism and clues to explain the plot of the story and the conflict the two characters are having.

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Throughout their conversation, you can decipher a tone where the conversation sheds light on his feelings towards the procedure and her feelings. He says “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig. It’s not really an operation at all” (Hemingway 124), in an effort to persuade her to in fact have the abortion. She, on the other hand, seems silent at first, but then questions how their life will be better after this procedure. Her uncertainty shows in her responses, and in other findings “… the sensuous beauty of a love relation that is quickly deteriorating, now that she has become conscious of her lover’s selfishness” (Maynard 273).

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This story—deceptively simple—is anything but straightforward. " Hills Like White Elephants" is a great portrait of how we talk at, to, and past each other; how we can go on and on and never quite get at what it is we really want to

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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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When first reading “Hills Like White Elephants,” the miscommunication and unintentional manipulation between characters, (an American man and a young woman who we can assume to be in a brief relationship with each other), may not be initially clear to the reader. The reader may first find the American man in the story to be harsh, controlling, and manipulative. However, after a closer second read one comes to realize that these assumptions about his character have come from simple miscommunication between characters. Hemingway refers to the female in the story specifically as a girl, not a woman, so we can infer that there is an age difference between the two characters which is also a contributing factor. As well, it becomes clear that the

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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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Ernest Hemingway, a world-renowned classical American author, leaves much to the reader’s imagination and interpretation in his stories. One example of this is his short story, Hills Like White Elephants, in which an unnamed man and a woman, Jig, are deciding whether or not to proceed with an “operation” (referring to an abortion) and may end up going their separate ways in the end. The overwhelming amount of symbolism in this story can be confusing at first, but after a closer look, Hemingway's tale seems to be one of genius. The story begins with Jig and the man ordering drinks at a bar between two train tracks, one going to Barcelona and the other to Madrid. The fact that the woman orders large alcoholic beverages could be interpreted

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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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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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In his story “Hills Like White Elephants”, Ernest Hemingway points out the couple's inability to make the decision: whether to abort the unborn child or not. The reader finds that the story deals with couple's miscommunication through the conversation and the emotions that they express. One can observe that no descriptions are given to the characters, thus, Hemingway creates universal dilemma to focus on the crucial issue. In this way, Hemingway leads the reader to identify with his female character that undergoes a struggle.

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