Hills Like White Elephants

            The short story Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway is a perfect example of what makes Hemingway one of the greatest writers of the 20^th century. There is little to go on in terms of narrative description since most of the short story is composed of dialogues. What it has is the pervading tension found only in the most brilliant stories, such as in Kafka’s Before the Law. The building up of the tension in the short story, as seen from the disagreement of the main characters about the white elephants hills to the continuous insistence of the man about the “perfectly simple operation”, takes up the plot element of this particular short story. As for the climax and denouement, for years, literary scholars have debated on how the story ended. And despite the lack of a definitive denouement, the story’s hanging ending was quite fitting to the sense of indirectness of the short story. Nevertheless, what most of the scholars agree upon is that no matter what the two characters did afterwards, their relationship is forever tainted and will no longer be as it was before (Hashimi, 2003). This then can be considered as the ending of the story. Literarily, Hills Like White Elephants is perfect in structure.

            As can be deduced in the story, the main subject of the short story is abortion. There is enough in the dialogue which directly suggests that the man is trying to coerce the woman into having an abortion. This is seen in his repeated, “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” and “It's not really an operation at all,” (Hemingway, 1927). This is the core of the story, and from here, Hemingway showed the different facets of man-woman relationship.

Although abortion is the main subject of the story, there is more than the simple argument about it in the short story. As the main characters talk about abortion, the woman is indirectly trying to say that there is more conflict between them than an unwanted baby. On the other hand, the man sees nothing more than this main problem and fails to see, or simply refuses to see, that there is more than what they are facing at the moment. The white elephants signify the obstacles or problems which the two persons see in their present circumstances. Both of the woman and the man are seeing “white elephants” but each of them has their own “white elephants”.

For the man, the white elephant is this unwanted child. He sees the baby as something that will prevent them both in continuing their life of “looking at things and trying new drinks”. For him, what is most important is to continue with the way his life is going, without any sense of permanent commitment and responsibility. He even tries to fool his girlfriend into believing that having the abortion would be for her own good. On the other hand, for the woman, the white elephants are more than the unwanted pregnancy. For her, it was like seeing the whole picture of their relationship for the first time. And what she sees is nothing more than the pursuit of pleasure. Then, there is also the realization that her boyfriend is ignoble, quite shallow and uncaring. Thus she tells him, “And once they take it away, you never get it back,” (Hemingway, 1927), referring to her own realization about their whole relationship and him as a man and her boyfriend.

In Hills Like White Elephants, Hemingway showed the man-woman relationship in its proper perspectives - that of the male and that of the female’s. At the same time, by showing these two perspectives he demonstrated the difference between the two sexes. The man was shown as quite logical and the woman as sentimental. Thus, Hemingway also showed that the difference between man and woman is in the way each views the “white elephants” in their horizon.

Works Cited

Hashmi, Nilofer. 2003. "Hills Like White Elephants": The Jilting of Jig.

Georgia Southern University. The Hemingway Review Project Muse.

Retrieved 3 March 2008 from

http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/hemingway_review/v023/23.1hashmi.html

Hemingway, Ernest. 1927. Hills Like White Elephants. Acadia University

Retrieved 3 March 2008 from

http://plato.acadiau.ca/courses/engl/lawson/acadia03/texts/HillsLikeWE.html