thesis statement for hills like white elephants

Critical Analysis of “Hills Like White Elephants” by E. Hemingway Research Paper

A short story is a rich and complex genre that encompasses a wide range of ideas and author concepts. The story “Hills Like White Elephants” by E. Hemingway is a prime example of how summarizing a situation in general terms can form deep connotations. A man and a woman are sitting at the station, drinking beer, and talking about what they both know. However, from the dialogue, it becomes clear that the key topic is abortion, which, according to the man, is “really an simple operation” (Hemingway 254). The woman, Jig, doubts whether she should decide on such a procedure, while the man is sure that this is necessary and is the only way to maintain the relationship between them. The elephant metaphor that Jig mentions when comparing these animals to the hills on the horizon reveals the underlying problem – what is undesirable and brings potential discomfort. In response to the woman’s remark, the man replies, “I’ve never seen one,” which indicates his desire to close his eyes to the problem (Hemingway 253). As a result, each of the parties remains unconvinced at the end of the dialogue.

This story is a good example to highlight Hemingway’s unique style and manner of conveying deep meaning through superficial descriptions. In his article “Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants,” Kozikowski notes that the writer creates a curtain between the two characters (107). This curtain is light and unobtrusive but, at the same time, separates them and does not allow agreeing on a common opinion due to their distinctive views. The man and the woman perceive the situation differently; for her, the topic of abortion is acute and worries her, while “he feels it as a simple, quick remedy to a removable annoyance” (Kozikowski 107). The inability of the characters to come to a consensus proves their incompatibility and lack of real love. Jig’s final smile emphasizes that she has already drawn her conclusions and determined how she will proceed in the future. As a result, the curtain between the characters does not disappear but, conversely, becomes even denser.

When assessing this position, I fully agree with the idea of a curtain between the characters in the story. As Kozikowski notes, two heavy bags that the man carries symbolize a mother and a child (108). For him, this burden is extremely heavy, and he is not ready for it from the very beginning, having fenced off from Jig with a curtain and separated their common interests and values from his own. The critical assessment of the behavior of Hemingway’s man and woman reflects the difference in views on what is important and what can preserve or, conversely, destroy the relationships. Therefore, this thesis is accurate and allows one to better understand why each of the characters has an individual vision of the situation.

Given the limited context, the curtain thesis may seem ambiguous due to the lack of sufficient background for analysis. Nevertheless, being familiar with Hemingway’s work, I can argue that his style of storytelling in short stories is the factor that eliminates the need to delve into causality. The information that is offered to the reader is sufficient to draw objective conclusions about the subtext and the main idea. According to Hemingway, the American man thinks of only himself, while the woman is not worried about her health or financial situation but is concerned whether she has the right to decide on an abortion (255). Therefore, I agree with the thesis that the main characters are separated by an invisible barrier that prevents them from understanding each other.

As I have read the critical article about the story in question, I have realized that the proposed development should not be associated with problems for Jig. The woman who has drawn appropriate conclusions for herself smiles, which, as Kozikowski remarks, “symbolizes her excision of the identityless “man” – his bull and seed – from her and her precious child’s lives” (108). She will surely overcome all difficulties and cope with problems since the decision she has made does not contradict her worldview. Thus, a critical analysis has made it possible to better understand the possible fate of the main heroine and her child.

Works Cited

Hemingway, E. “Hills Like White Elephants.” The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway , edited by Séan Hemingway, Scribner, 2017, pp. 253-256.

Kozikowski, Stanley. “Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants.” The Explicator , vol. 52, no. 2, 1994, pp. 107-109.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants

Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 25, 2021

The frequently anthologized Hills Like White Elephants first printed in transition magazine in 1927 is often read and taught as a perfect illustration of Ernest Hemingway’s minimalist, self-proclaimed “iceberg” style of writing: In much of Hemingway’s fiction what is said in the story often is less important than what has not been said. Like the iceberg—only one-eighth of which is visible above the surface—Hemingway’s fiction is much richer than its spare language suggests. Hemingway has great faith in his readers and leaves them to discern what is truly happening from the scant facts he presents on the surface of his story. On a superficial level, Hills is merely about a man, a woman, and an “awfully simple operation” (275). What the narrator never actually tells the reader, however, is that “awfully simple operation” is an abortion, a taboo subject in 1925. Underneath the surface of this story are THEMEs and motifs that are characteristic of many of Hemingway’s other works as well. As do many of those works, “Hills” tells the story of an American abroad and depicts the strained relationships between men and women that clearly intrigued the author. As with many of the relationships Hemingway portrays, this man and woman apparently have nothing in common but sex and the heavy consumption of alcoholic beverages.

thesis statement for hills like white elephants

Ernest Hemingway/Goodreads

Hills is also a story of avoidance. Instead of having a significant, rational conversation about the issue at hand, the “girl,” Jig, says only that the hills of Spain look like white elephants. “Wasn’t that clever?” she asks the unnamed man (274). This rather inconsiderate male companion agrees, but he actually wants to talk about the procedure. Jig would rather not discuss it. When he pressures her, she replies, “Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me.” Jig is the typical Hemingway female, selfless and sacrificial. She is prepared to have the abortion, but the reader is left with the distinct impression that any previous magic between the couple is gone. “It isn’t ours anymore,” Jig tells the American (276). The unfortunate accident of pregnancy has ruined the relationship; it will never be the same. Hemingway explores many of the same themes in his important war novel A Farewell to Arms and in The Sun Also Rises.

Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s Novels

BIBLIOGRAPHY Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants.” 1927. Reprinted in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition. New York: Scribner, 1987. Johnston, Kenneth. “ ‘Hills Like White Elephants’: Lean, Vintage Hemingway.” Studies in American Fiction (1982). Renner, Stanley. “Moving to the Girl’s Side of Hills.” The Hemingway Review (1995).

A Summary and Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Hills Like White Elephants’ (1927) is one of Ernest Hemingway’s best-known and most critically acclaimed short stories. In just five pages, Hemingway uses his trademark style – plain dialogue and description offered in short, clipped sentences – to expose an unspoken subject that a man and a young woman are discussing.

You can read ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of the story.

Plot summary

A man (an American expatriate) and a young girl (or ‘girl’) are drinking in the bar of a railway station in Spain, while waiting for their train. As it’s hot, they order some beers to drink, and then try an aniseed drink. The girl looks at the line of hills in the valley of the Ebro and remarks that they look like white elephants.

Her male companion, with whom we deduce she is in some sort of relationship, says he has never seen a white elephant and then gets defensive and annoyed when she remarks that he wouldn’t have, presumably because they’re so rare.

Their small talk then takes in the curtains of the bar, but gradually their conversation turns to an ‘operation’ (of sorts) which the man is trying to persuade the girl to undertake.

This procedure, which is referred to as ‘it’ throughout the story, is almost certainly an abortion, the girl having fallen pregnant by the man. However, it becomes clear that he wishes her to get rid of the baby, although she remains undecided. Eventually, growing tired of the man’s attempts to sway her, she demands that he stop talking.

They hear that their train is arriving, but when the man goes outside there is no sign of it. When he goes back inside and asks the girl how she is feeling, she replies curtly that she’s ‘fine’.

The title of Hemingway’s story, ‘Hills Like White Elephants’, is fitting for a number of reasons. First and perhaps most obviously, the title of the story denotes not the main and most pressing topic of the two main characters’ conversation – the unspoken ‘it’, the girl’s ‘operation’, which the man is trying to encourage her to have – but one aspect of their small talk as they skirt around that topic.

The girl’s comment about the Spanish hills looking like white elephants is mere filler, an example of ‘treading water’ as she and her male companion drink enough alcohol to make broaching the dread topic of their conversation – without actually directly mentioning it – palatable or even possible.

‘White elephants’ itself has two potential meanings here. There is a rare albino elephant known as the white elephant, whose presence at the royal court, in countries like Burma and Thailand, was considered a sign that the monarch reigned justly, and that the kingdom would be blessed with peace and prosperity.

But the second meaning is implied in Hemingway’s story. A ‘white elephant’ is a Western cultural term describing a possession which its owner cannot dispose of. The maintenance cost of such a possession is out of proportion to its usefulness or desirability.

Given the (implied) topic of the man and girl’s conversation – the girl’s reluctant decision to abort the baby she has conceived by the man – this meaning of ‘white elephant’ comes into view with a tragic force. The (unwanted) baby the girl has conceived with the man is like the proverbial white elephant, something that would cost a great deal for her to keep and maintain.

But by the same token, she finds it hard to ‘get rid of’ her white elephant, presumably because of the finality of such an act, though it is also implied that she worries over the safety of the procedure. (We should remember that medical procedures in 1927 were often not as relatively clean or as advanced as they now are.)

So the very title of Hemingway’s short story, ‘Hills Like White Elephants’, subtly and obliquely references the very thing which the two of them cannot bring themselves to mention or name openly: the title, then, both reveals and conceals the real subject of the story.

‘Hills Like White Elephants’ contains many of the most representative elements of Hemingway’s fiction: the spare style, the plain and direct dialogue, and the Spanish landscape which he often wrote about. And yet all three of these things can be said to work against, or be in tension with, the story’s subject-matter.

The spare style exposes the uncomfortable nature of the couple’s relationship (despite his repeated exhortations that she shouldn’t go through with ‘it’ unless she wants to, he is clearly trying to persuade her to have the abortion for his sake); the directness of the dialogue masks the failure of the two characters to have a frank conversation about ‘it’; and the Spanish landscape is not mere backdrop but a detail that is brought into the story only because the girl is finding it hard to address the momentous subject she knows she must eventually face.

And that leads us to wonder whether there might not be another meaning playing around that title, ‘Hills Like White Elephants’: the so-called ‘elephant in the room’, the idiom (prominent in the United States by the early twentieth century) denoting a conspicuous and important issue which nobody wants to discuss.

One also wonders whether, somewhere in his prodigious mind, Hemingway was recalling Mark Twain’s 1882 detective story, ‘ The Stolen White Elephant ’, in which the elephant turns out to have been in the original spot all along. Like the proverbial elephant in the room, Hemingway’s ‘hills like white elephants’ are there, prominent and immovable, and even getting on a train is not going to allow one to escape their true meaning.

Because so much of the characters’ dialogue works by subtext and through small talk, we are encouraged to deduce the nature of their relationship through observing how they interact, even more than by paying attention to what they talk about.

The man’s response to the girl’s dismissive comment that he wouldn’t have ever seen an actual white elephant is a case in point, since it suggests a controlling aspect to his personality, whereby an offhand and largely meaningless remark is taken up by him and responded to in a manner that is as defensive as it is petty.

Similarly, it is worth pointing out that the girl goes back on her initial statement that the hills resemble white elephants, saying shortly after this that the hills don’t actually look that much like white elephants after all, and only remind her of their colour. (This is interesting because many so-called white elephants are ‘white’ only in name: many of them are actually grey or pinkish in colour.)

This similarly reflects her vacillation over ‘it’, the termination of her pregnancy which she is evidently reluctant to undertake. As so often in a Hemingway story, how he reveals things through characters’ dialogue is as significant – and perhaps in this case even more so – than what is (not) being said.