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Short Story 'Hills Like White Elephants'

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“Hills Like White Elephants” is a short story told from a third person narrator. I believe that the narrator is their waitress. She hears everything that they are saying and acts like a fly on the wall watching them. The narrator said, “It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in 40 minutes.” If the narrator is the woman then she knows that the woman is about to leave on the next train. The refer to her as a woman, so she has to be around middle aged, which to me is about 40 years old. The waitress is the only person that is close enough to hear their conversation. She is close and seems like she is interested.
The title, “Hills Like Whit Elephants”, is a symbolism of the beauty and illusion of the earth. It seems that the
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The story of the Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway is about an American man and a young girl. They were waiting at a train station in Barcelona, drinking together. While they were waiting on the train to go to Madrid they had a conversation about something. Although the dialogue didn’t directly say what they were discussing, certain clues were given that pieced everything together about the conversation they were having. The interactions between the two have something to do with the fact that they had a physical encounter.

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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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"Hills Like White Elephants" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway that was published in 1927. The story takes place in a train station in Spain. There are two central characters, the American and Jig. They are having a very serious conversation about a pivotal point in their relationship. They are discussing about a certain operation that is not specifically explained in the story, but it is implied to be an abortion.

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The couple is surrounded by hills and the girl in the story, at one point, says that they are shaped like white elephants. The setting is important because when the girl says she sees white elephants, then she wants to have a conversation about her unborn child with the man and when she changes her statement later, she is thinking about getting an abortion. The male character is not admirable because he isn’t listening to his girlfriend properly and he simply wants her to get an operation. Even though it isn’t mentioned in the story, it is apparent that he wans to get rid of the baby.

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This text was written by Jay Mclerney as a part of the novel “Bright Lights, Big City” in 1984. It is a narrative text with a lot of dialogues such as “My birthday is January thirteenth. I will be twenty-nine years old”, “Excuse me, sir, but you’re sitting on me”. These dialogues help animate the text. The text is targeted to everyone in the society and the goal is to entertain the readers and to deliver a message that people should be more open minded to actively help other people in need instead of waiting for another person to do it instead.

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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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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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One of the most interesting aspects of Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" is the use of symbols and figurative language to indicate the meaning of his short story. Hemingway's complex writing style conveys a major theme of talking versus communicating. " Hills Like White Elephants" focuses on an American man and a young woman named Jig at a train station in Spain in the 1920s where they discuss if Jig should get an abortion or not. Although the couple has a conversation throughout the entire story, neither of them can articulate their feelings effectively and take the time to listen or understand each other. Hemingway's significant use of figurative language allows the reader to realize that the description of the setting in the

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The only type of beverage that has been around for as long as humans have, and consistently has been an immensely popular drink is an alcoholic beverage. Alcoholic beverages are typically a celebratory drink, but as a recurring symbol in Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “Hills Like White Elephants”, alcoholic beverages are tools used by the American man to solve the problem in his relationship with Jig. The story takes place in Spain and entails an implicit and tense conversation between a manipulative American man and a young Spanish girl named Jig, which is comical because the American man is in Spain . As they talk, the American man orders various alcoholic drinks for Jig and himself to try while trying to convince Jig to get an abortion.

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Chopin may suggest that Mrs. Mallard feels restricted to live her life with a partner in her life. Hemmingway does not reveal the thoughts of the characters leaving readers at suspense. Readers must interpret what is going on between the girlfriend and her boyfriend in Hills Like White Elephants (Hemmingway). The white elephants in his story represent fertility. Both the woman and her boyfriend struggle to speak of abortion.

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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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One main theme in Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is the idea of disconnection. In this story, we eavesdrop on a conversation held between both characters. In their dialogue, conflict is created as the characters face what most readers believe to be the obstacle of unexpected pregnancy. This is assumed through symbolism and the titles meaning. The term “white elephant” was used for an unwanted gift.

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For example, when she said, “And if I do it you will be happy, and things will be like they were.” (255), she is lonely and desperate girl who is still having hope of being happy. She is in a bad mood and depressed too much to even ready to die, it is obvious from her reply, “I don’t care about me” (255) multiple times, waiting for him to say nice words or even make her feel good. He seems as being selfish and careless by starting this relationship and then lacking the support Jig needs from him. Hills Like White Elephant has a huge description on the story’s sitting in the train station, surrounded with hills, fields, and tress in a valley in Spain.

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Set in the early 1920s, Ernest Hemingway (1927) writes the short story “Hills Like White Elephants” in limited descriptions of the background and the main characters with the intention of using iceberg theory, while immersing readers into the conversation of the main characters deeply by skillfully using the objective third person point of view. The protagonists, a girl named Jig and an American man, are waiting for the train heading to Madrid in the shade while discussing “an awfully simple operation” (Hemingway, 254) that the man urges the girl to have. In the course of the discussion, the man hypocritically comforts the girl that it is okay if she insists she would not have the operation but actually suggests the operation is what the girl

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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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