Theirs has been a peripatetic, rootless life, as barren in some ways as the countryside in which they now find themselves. The woman is wiser she knows that their relationship has already been poisoned forever and that her pregnancy is not the sole cause. it’s all perfectly natural.” The woman, who sits silent through his pleading, finally replies, “Then what will we do afterward?” The man repeatedly assures her that things will be fine if she agrees only to terminate her pregnancy, since in his view the baby will destroy the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. “It’s really an awfully simple operation,” he tells her. The man finally mentions, in an almost offhand way, the subject that is really on his mind: He wants the woman to have an abortion.
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Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.” The harshness of their responses contrasts with the inconsequential nature of the subject of their discussion, suggesting that the relationship between them is somehow strained but that neither wishes to discuss openly the real issue over which they are at odds.įor nearly half the story, the two try to make conversation that will ease the tension, but their remarks serve only to heighten it. The girl mentions that the hills in the distance “look like white elephants,” to which her companion replies, “I’ve never seen one.” She immediately responds, “No, you wouldn’t have,” and he fires back, “I might have. Much of the dialogue seems little more than small talk, but there is an underlying sense of tension from the very first exchange between the man and the girl after they order their beer. The entire story consists of a single scene in which the man and the girl sit in the café, drink various alcoholic beverages, and converse. Only three characters appear: a man identified as an American, a girl, and a woman who serves them in the little café at which they have stopped to wait for the train that passes through the unnamed town on the route from Barcelona to Madrid. On one side of the little junction station, there are fertile fields on the other, a barren landscape.
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Hemingway sketches the background deftly in a single opening paragraph of half a dozen sentences, each of which provides vital information that establishes a physical setting and a symbolic backdrop for the tale.
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The technique is readily apparent in “Hills Like White Elephants.” Set in Spain during the hot summer, the story contains little overt action. He expressed his belief and described his own method in a passage in Death in the Afternoon: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer has stated them.” Following this dictum, Hemingway constructed stories that sometimes make readers feel as if they are unseen auditors at some closet drama, or silent observers at intimate moments in the lives of characters struggling with important, although often private, issues.
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Nowhere does he achieve greater mastery of his medium than in his short stories. Reacting against the overblown, rhetorical, and often bombastic narrative techniques of his predecessors, Hemingway spent considerable time as a young man working to perfect the spare form of narration, dialogue, and description that became the hallmark of his fiction. By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on NovemĪny study of Ernest Hemingway’s (J– July 2, 1961) short stories must begin with a discussion of style.