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Judith Ortiz's Short Story 'Hills Like White Elephants'

528 Words3 Pages

Today we as humans are always so quick to judge others and give titles, there is always a need to have “good guy” and along comes a “bad guy.” When in all reality we are all just trying to be the “good guy” in our own way. Weather it may be morals and religion that make us believe that what we are doing is the right thing to do or simply learning that something is correct based on family, society, and what we are taught to believe is right. We are all always striving to please someone. We as humans who make mistakes shouldn't be so quick to give someone a title based on what we think is right. We are all only human and want nothing more than to please someone in some way or another. In the poem Latin Women Pray by Judith Ortiz the young Latin woman praying doesn't really know if the God she is and has been praying to, her whole life can really understand her or her fellow sisters, but that by no means stops her from praying to him. Why? Because that is how she was raised to pray to him despite her not knowing if he could really understand them. The young Latin woman knew that this not only made the God she was praying to happy, but she knew it made her family happy as well. In the short story “ Hills like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway the young woman is forced to do …show more content…

Where have you been?” by Joyce Carol Oates we see another young woman trying to please not only her own family and her friends, but a random stranger named Arnold Friend as well! She was just a typical teenager just trying to fit in and please the ones around her and we later find out that trying to please other people isn't always in our best interest because this guy Arnold Friend ended up persuading her to go with him somewhere where she had never been before and promised her a good time. Connie already felt as if she had let her family down because she was constantly being compared to her sister so she fell into his

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Living “just an ordinary girl’s” life was no longer the lifestyle for a girl named Connie. Once a man told her that she was gonna be his, her life turned. Connie was no longer able to forget about reality instead she was forced into adulthood by a man named Arnold Friend. Connie is the main character in the short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, by Joyce Carol Oates. The story is mainly about how Arnold Friend, a sort of stalker of Connie’s, comes to her house.

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The story presents a rebellious teenager named Connie who is also preoccupied with her appearance. She was approached by Arnold Friend in her house but before this,

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When Antonio first accepted the Catholic god in the form of the Eucharist, he “received him gladly” and waited for the “thousand questions” that “ pushed through” his “mind” to be answered. Even though Antonio waited for the answers “the Voice . . did not answer” (Anaya, 221). Anaya’s use of diction in this excerpt, developed the mood that, Antonio was disappointed in the Catholic god. Moreover, the quote depicted how Antonio did not get any answers to questions which haunted him for so long.

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In the short story, “Where are You Going, Where have You Been?,” Joyce Carol Oates provides an account of a typical fifteen-year-old girl whose days are spent disregarding her parents, hanging out with her friends, and daydreaming about boys. That is, until she meets Arnold Friend. The story takes an unexpected turn soon after the ironically named character is introduced. Eventually, Arnold Friend’s cunning deception leads to Connie’s unanticipated demise.

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In the short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates, the protagonist Connie’s misperceptions about the adult world results in her rapid jolt from adolescence into the horrific realities of adulthood. Connie romanticizes the idea of romance, leading her to a great shock when her fantasizes of love come true in a perverted way through the character Arnold Friend. Additionally, her misperceptions about physical beauty as her determining factor of a person’s persona leads her to obsess over physical image highlighting her flaw of vanity. Connie’s idealistic views of adult romance and physical beauty blinds her to the wickedness of the character Arnold Friend who bring about her involuntary downfall into the horrific

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Then another time, I came in from outside with my hands full of anthuriums. I looked up at him, and I thought why not. I set up a vase on the table right under his picture… I don’t know if that’s how it started, but pretty soon, I was praying to him, not because he was worthy or anything like that. I wanted something from him, and prayer was the only way I knew to ask” (Alvarez 202).

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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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By definition a “White Elephant” in literature is a possession which its owner cannot dispose of and whose cost is out of proportion to its usefulness. In the following short story, the situation that the couple is in can be described as a “White Elephant”. Throughout the story a couple, a Spanish woman and an American man, are sitting at a train station waiting for their train. While there, they decide to talk about the issue at hand, a pregnancy. Jig, the Spanish woman, is eager to keep the unborn child as the American man who is the father is not.

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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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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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Can we consider people as Good or Evil? People can be defined as neither good nor evil because many factors lead to us being a mixture of both. One of these factors is that we only have one perspective of life and the actions they do. This means we don 't have all the information to be able to form an opinion on them. Another factor is that we are unable to measure how good or bad an action is.

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