Ernest Hemingway has endured. For almost one hundred years his writing has been praised, imitated, mocked, dismissed, rediscovered, and praised again. Love or hate him – apparently, there’s no other option – Hemingway’s influence on modern literature is undeniable. So large looms his shadow that it takes a brave writer to attempt a simple and direct style, to construct a novel or a story with modest vocabulary, terse description and clipped dialogue.     Novels such as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea are heavyweight classics. But it’s Hemingway’s short stories that many consider the pinnacle of his talent, the distillation of his vision. A series of reflective, semi-autobiographical tales featuring Nick Adams as protagonist were written when Hemingway was in his mid-twenties and living in Paris after WWI. Later, in his thirties, came a couple of unforgettable African stories. Both set on safari and featuring American married couples, they are studies of relationships gone sour and courage under pressure.        

Hills Like White Elephants falls within this ten-year purple streak. Written in 1927, it is perhaps one of the most striking examples of what Hemingway referred to as his Iceberg Theory, suggesting that the emotional weight of a story lies more in the writer’s omission of details than what we as the reader see on the surface. An American man and his female companion – referred to as the girl, and later, Jig – wait for a train to Madrid. They sit at a table in the shadow of the station. In the distance the hills across the valley of the Ebro are long and white. It’s a hot day and they decide to have a drink, order two beers through a beaded curtain hanging across the open door of the bar. A woman answers, delivers the two beers with two felt pads and sets them on the table. The girl looks off across the brown country to the white hills in the sun.The rest of the story is conducted almost wholly in dialogue. The girl comments that the hills look like white elephants. They discuss Anis del Toro, a liquorice-flavoured drink, and the girl decides to try one.

She mentions the hills again, suggests it was a bright observation. They have another drink, a beer, and the man turns the conversation toward the subject of an operation. He attempts to convince the girl that everything will be fine. The operation is perfectly simple, just to let the air in. The girl isn’t convinced. She’s worried it will change things between them. Eventually, the girl refuses to talk about the operation any longer, pleads with the man to quit the conversation, and after a cap-gun parting shot rebuked by the girl, he concedes by carting their heavy bags across the tracks to where the train to Madrid is due in five minutes. When he returns, he asks the girl if she feels any better.                At first glance, the four-page narrative appears nothing more than a casual conversation between a man and a woman as they wait for a train to Madrid. No line, no passage, is particularly arresting or brilliant, at least not on the surface. The language is simple, declarative.

Mild tension arises early on with a couple sarcastic jabs between the characters, builds to a heated discussion, and ends unresolved.          But this is Hemingway’s genius. Pathos is achieved by repetition and the accumulation of small, often vague details. The word abortion never appears in the text, but it’s safe to say that this is the operation the protagonists are discussing throughout the story. dunelm silver blackout curtainsSometimes the abstract idea of space in literature is a difficult concept to grasp. traverse curtain rod definitionWe want minutiae of character and setting, but if the features are painted too thickly, the portrait, as well as the landscape, can be ruined. john lewis blackout curtain lining

Hills, like much of Hemingway’s best work, is all about suggestion. The vast majority of the story is dialogue, but the lack of communication between the couple rings true. They talk, but never really understand each other. We know the characters from their actions, by what they say. The bones are laid bare, only the essentials exist. And if the perceptive reader wishes to construct symbols from the reportage, the conversation, they are free to do so.  john lewis blackout curtain liningThere’s space to breathe in Hills. Read the story in a short sitting. Think nothing of it. And a week later, remembering it as you’re sending the kids off to school, feeding the dog, mowing the lawn, waiting for the dentist or driving home from work, it will break your heart."Hills Like White Elephants" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. It was first published in August 1927, in the literary magazine transition, then later in the 1927 short story collection Men Without Women.

The story takes place at a train station in the Ebro River valley of Spain. This particular day is oppressively hot and dry, and the scenery in the valley is barren and ugly for the most part. The two main characters are a man (referred to only as "the American") and his female companion, whom he refers to as "Jig". While waiting for the train to Madrid, the American and the girl with him drink beer and a liquor called Anís del Toro, which the girl compares to liquorice. Their conversation is mundane at first, but quickly drifts to the subject of an operation the American is attempting to convince the girl to undergo. Though it is never made explicit in the text, it is made clear (through phrases of dialogue such as, "It's just to let the air in", and, "But I don't want anybody but you", among numerous context clues) that the girl is pregnant and the procedure in question is an abortion. After posing arguments to which the American is largely unresponsive, the girl assents to the operation, while declaring that she does not care about herself.

The man tries to give the girl a feel that he is letting her decide but tries to convince her to proceed with the operation. The girl is uncomfortable with their conversation and tries to persuade the man into quieting. He does not concur. The barmaid comes out through the beaded curtains with two glasses of beer and puts them down on the felt pads. She notes that the train will be arriving shortly. The girl is distracted, but then smiles brightly at the woman and thanks her. The American leaves the table and carries their bags to the opposing platform, but there's still no sight of the train in the distance. He walks back through the station, and everyone else is still waiting reasonably for the train. Pausing at the bar, he drinks another Anis del Toro, alone, before rejoining the girl. He then asks her, "Do you feel better?" She again smiles at him, "I feel fine. There's nothing wrong with me. The girl's reference to white elephants could be in regards to the baby. The American could see the baby as a white elephant and does not want to raise it because of the cost, while the girl could see the child as an extraordinary addition to her mundane life of drinking and mindless traveling.

[2] "Hills Like White Elephants" shows Hemingway's use of iceberg theory or theory of omission: a message is presented through a story's subtext; for instance, in the story the word "abortion" is never mentioned, although the male character seems to be attempting to convince his girlfriend to have an abortion.[3] The symbolism of the hills and the big white elephant can be thought of as the images of a pregnant woman's swollen breasts and abdomen, and the prenatal dream of the mother of the future Buddha in which a white elephant appears to her (in this case, as a symbol of prestigious leadership). Apart from the hills, other parts of the setting provide symbolism which expresses the tension and conflict surrounding the couple. The train tracks form a dividing line between the barren expanse of land stretching toward the hills on one side and the green, fertile farmland on the other, symbolizing the choice faced by each of the main characters and their differing interpretations of the dilemma of pregnancy.

The girl focuses on the landscape during the conversation, rarely making eye contact with the American. The reader must interpret their dialogue and body language to infer their backgrounds and their attitudes with respect to the situation at hand, and their attitudes toward one another. From the outset of the story, the contentious nature of the couple's conversation indicates resentment and unease. Some critics have written that the dialogue is a distillation of the contrasts between stereotypical male and female relationship roles: in the excerpt above, for instance, the girl draws the comparison with white elephants, but the hyper-rational male immediately denies it, dissolving the bit of poetry into objective realism with "I've never seen one." By saying, "No, you wouldn't have" she implies he hadn't had a child before, or hadn't allowed birth in the past. She also asks his permission to order a drink. Throughout the story, the girl is distant; the American is rational. While the American attempts to frame the fetus as the source of the couple's discontent with life and one another, the tone and pattern of dialogue indicate that there may be deeper problems with the relationship than the purely circumstantial.