that they "can" do these things, however, the woman now says no, they can't, her change in verb tense suggesting that the possible lives they once could have pursued (and produced) are even now, before any firm decision has been spoken, irrevocably out of reach. When the man says that he will go along with whatever she wants, the woman asks him to "please please please please please please please stop talking" or she will scream. The train arrives during this impasse, and once the bags are loaded, the woman, smiling brightly, insists she feels fine.
Commentary
This story deftly and painfully captures the difficulty of talking about, or rather around, abortion. The fact that neither person specifies what this "operation" is called exemplifies their communication problem, as does the man's odd comments about the procedure "letting the air in," the woman's fumbling with her metaphor, and the tonal shifts in each person's remarks, from sarcastic to earnest to resigned. An effective way to stimulate discussion of this story is to have two readers assume the two voices.
Summary:
Hills Like White Elephants By Ernest Hemingway
Hills Like White Elephants Hills Like White Elephants, is a short story, written by author Ernest Hemingway. It is a story about a man and a woman waiting at a train station talking about an issue that they never name. I believe this issue is abortion. In this paper I will prove that the girl in the story, who's name is Jig, finally decides to go ahead and have the baby even though the man, who does not have a name, wants her to have an abortion. It is the end of the story that makes me think this. First of all I will prove that it is an abortion that this couple is discussing. The man says that it is an operation, and an abortion is an operation. Also, he says that it is just to let the air in, which can be interpreted as meaning that the doctors who are performing the abortion will let the air into the uterus as they remove the fetus (283). The man says that he has known lots of people that have done it. Which suggests that this is a common operation like an abortion. It also shows the moral depravity of the world of these people because so many women are having abortions. Finally, the man says that he wants their relationship to be just like we were before (284). This suggests that the relationship has changed, as it would with a baby, if the girl has an abortion things will return to the same as before the pregnancy. We don't know what the couple acted like before the pregnancy, however, we are certainly not meant to like their behavior as they talk about the abortion. Now that I have established that the couple is having an abortion, I will establish the girl's behavior because this is important for figuring out the way in which she has made up her mind at the end of the story. Early in the story we get a glimpse at Jig's disgust with her male partner. She looks at the hills in the distance and says They look like white elephants (282). The man responds that he has never seen one after which he drinks more beer (282). Jig then responds: No, you wouldn't have (292). The man gets really defensive when she says this, Jig ignores him. The scene is important because it shows that from the very beginning of the story Jig is talking down to the man and does not have much respect for him. The fact that she is not surprised he's never seen a white elephant. She thinks him to be a narrow-minded pig. A white elephant is something that is unwanted. And this guy never deals with things that he does not want. He just shuts his mind to them. The girl in this seen seems to recognize this fact. Since we see the girl acting with condescension and sarcasm right in the first scene when the couple talks about white elephants, we need to keep this attitude in mind when we read there subsequent conversations. For example. On page 284 Jig says Then I'll do it. Because I don't care about me. On the same page she also says I'll do it and then everything will be fine (284). The man responds to this by saying that I don't want you to do it if you feel that way (284). The reader is left asking, feel what way? Clearly the man has picked up on something that we the readers have not been told by the narrator of the story. The mans mention of feel that way suggests that Jig is not using a sincere tone when she says that she does not care about herself and she will do it to make everything fine. Most likely, drawing on the evidence of the discussion of white elephants, we can conclude that Jig is being sarcastic here. She does care about herself and she does not think everything will be OK. This is an important point. Closer to the end of the story, on page 286, the man keeps making comments like I don't care anything about it. As has been seen, the man does care about it and Jig has become upset by his insincere statements. She tries to shut him up by saying please please please please please please stop talking and also I'll scream (286). Both her condescending attitude toward the man earlier and her efforts to shut him out at this point in the story suggest that she is totally fed up with his advice and is going to make her own decision. We see that she does this at the end: He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other racks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the barroom, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him. (286) This is the first time she has smiled or seemed content in the entire story. She was not content when the guy was bullying her into getting an abortion, so we can conclude that her happiness at this point in the story is the result of being left alone for a few minutes so that she could decide what she want to do on her own. Her final comment that there’s nothing wrong with me lets us know that she no longer sees the pregnancy as something wrong (286). She has accepted her pregnancy and plans to keep the baby. In conclusion, Ernest Hemingway's short story Hills like White Elephants is about a man and a woman struggling to deal with an unwanted baby. The author, Hemingway, never explicitly tells us what the girl decides to do about the baby, but he does give us enough clues to figure out what she has decided by the end of the story. These clues have to do with the story's tone like the way that the things that the guy says make us understand Jig's tone of disapproval. Overall this story is like an iceberg with most of the substance hiding beneath the surface.
Introduction
First published in transition in August of 1927, “Hills Like White Elephants” became an important piece in Hemingway’s second collection of short stories, Men Without Women. Hemingway wrote the story soon after the publication of his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises, while living in Paris. Men Without Women was well-received, as were Hemingway’s other early works. He was embraced by the expatriate literary community in Paris and received strong reviews on his work in the United States and abroad. Although he continued to write novels and stories throughout his career, the early short stories are often considered to be among his finest works. ‘‘Hills Like White Elephants,’’ a widely-anthologized and much-discussed story, offers a glimpse at the spare prose and understated dialogue that represents Hemingway’s mastery of style.
The story, told nearly in its entirety through dialogue, is a conversation between a young woman and a man waiting for a train in Spain. As they talk, it becomes clear that the young woman is pregnant and that the man wants her to have an abortion. Through their tight, brittle conversation, much is revealed about their personalities. At the same time, much about their relationship remains hidden. At the end of the story it is still unclear as to what decision has or has not been made, or what will happen to these two characters waiting for a train on a platform in Spain.
Summary:
The story opens with the description of distant hills across a river in Spain. An American and his girlfriend sit outside a train station in the heat. No other details about their relationship are provided at the beginning of the story. They decide to order beer, and the woman who works at the bar brings the drinks to their table. The girl remarks that the distant hills look like white elephants, but the man discounts her remark.
The story continues to unfold through dialogue, and it becomes clear that the girl, Jig, does not understand Spanish while the American does.
Three-Day Blow
The main characters are Bill and Nick. The story is basically a conversation between the two. Nick and Bill sat and talked about baseball and books they read as they drank whiskey. They were wanting to drink until they got drunk.
Nick had been going with Marjorie, and they were going to get married. However, they broke up and went their separate ways. As a result, Nick and Bill continued to drink and get drunk. Nick wanted to forget his problems with Marjorie.
This was an interesting story. However, it was a little confusing at first, but after I read it through and thought about the story, I began to understand it more.
Now, let's look at "Hills Like White Elephants."
Hills Like White Elephants
This is another story that is basically dialogue. It's a conversation between an American man and a girl. They were sitting at a bar and ordered beer. The girl sat and stared out the window at the line of hills. They were white, so she told the man that they looked like white elephants.
The girl was talking to the man about her operation. He told her it was a simple operation. They talked about how they knew people who had done the operation. They also talked about how they loved each other. Now, you'll have to read the stories to find out what happened.
My View Point
Both of these stories are interesting and a little confusing. Readers aren't sure what is happening except through dialogue, and that can be confusing, too.
The dialogue between the two main characters is one thing the two stories had in common. Also, the main characters in both stories drank beer while they talked. In the first story, the characters seemed to want to escape their trials, so they drank beer. They kept talking about drinking beer and getting drunk. In the second story, the beer was more of a social event rather than trying to forget about their problems. They didn't seem to want to forget their problems. They were sitting down at the train station and talking while they drank beer and waited for the train to arrive.
However, I do recommend these stories to anyone who likes to read stories by Ernest Hemingway.
Symbolism through Setting in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”
Ernest Hemingway, in “Hills Like White Elephants,” uses particular aspects of the setting to help portray the conflict between an American man and a woman identified as Jig. The couple, traveling through Spain, is waiting for a train at a junction between Barcelona and Madrid. While they sit and drink, the man and Jig discuss the future of their unborn child and the possibility of her having an abortion. While talking to the man, Jig admires the landscape. Through her eyes, Hemingway describes the surrounding landscape. Hemingway uses the imagery of the setting to symbolize the Jig’s indecision about her abortion.
The first apparent landscape feature present in the setting is the train station at which the couple is waiting for the next train. The train station is located in a valley with hills surrounding on either side. This valley “is neatly bisected into two sides, ‘this’ side (the infertile side, ‘brown and dry with ‘no trees’), and ‘the other’ side (the fertile side: fields of grain, the river, the trees), by not one but ‘two lines of rails’” (Justice, 2). Since the station is located in an area with two contrasting landscapes on either side, the reader can assume that these two opposite landscapes represent the two opposite opinions of Jig concerning her abortion.
In addition to being located in an area with contrasting landscapes on either side of the valley, the station is divided by two rails that travel in opposite directions. The station is located “between two lines of rails in the sun” (Hemingway, 273). In fact, these two rails are “presumably going in opposite directions” and “represent figuratively the decision point at which the couple find themselves” (Renner, 2). The two rails represent the two paths the couple could take, to either have the abortion or to give birth to the child. In addition, the two paths represent that “the couple are choosing between two ways of life. The choice of abortion is associated with the arid sterility of the hills on the barren side of the valley and by extension with the aimless, hedonistic life they have been leading” (Renner, 2). The couple can either choose the carefree life they had been living, or can choose to give birth to the child and allow their relationship to mature and change. Hemingway uses the rails present at the train station to represent the two paths that the couple can take: the path of birth, or the path of abortion.
The location of the couple inside the train station is also an important factor to understanding the symbolism behind the setting. Throughout most of the story, Jig resides in a shadow in the train station. At one point, however, she steps out from the shadow into the light, perhaps meaning that she has “seen the light.” This representation of the light in the station represents her consideration of another side of the decision: to have the child. In fact, the man with whom she is traveling tells her “Come on back into the shade. You mustn’t feel that way” (Hemingway, 276). Later in the story, as the man goes to get the baggage, he walks around the station, moves the baggage, and sits down in the bar and has a drink. While the man walks around inside the decision, he is possibly considering other options for the abortion. Hemingway, throughout the story, uses the station as a means to represent their options in the abortion situation.
In addition to the station, Hemingway uses the white hills themselves to represent different aspects of the woman’s decision. These white hills, which are found on either side of the station, are described as “white elephants.” According to Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, a white elephant can have three possible meanings. A “white elephant” can be defined as the actual Indian elephant from which Eastern legends are produced, “a property requiring much care and expense and yielding little profit,” and “an object no longer esteemed by its owner though not without value to others” (Webster’s, 1018). Using these three definitions, Hemingway creates different symbolic meanings for the hills.
Hemingway first expects the reader to understand the white elephant definition as something that one person does not find of value, but something that someone else might value. Justice writes that “ a first connotation of “white elephants” is purely American: unwanted junk. But not just any unwanted junk, the junk you bring to the “white elephant sale” because although you find it worthless, someone else might not” (2). Hemingway uses this definition of the white elephant to represent something that was once of value to its owner, but has since lost its value. When Jig told the American man of her pregnancy, her body became to him like a “white elephant” because she no longer could carry on the same type of relationship they had once shared; instead, their relationship would change (Hannum, 1). Hemingway uses the description of the hills as white elephants because Jig begins to view herself as a white elephant to the man.
Not only does Jig view herself as a white elephant to the man, but the fetus also becomes a white elephant to the man. Howard Hannum writes that “[o]nce her lover identifies the pregnant Jig in this category, he surely regards the fetus in the same light. Somewhere during the early dialogue, the idea must occur to Jig that the fetus and she are ‘white elephants’ to him”(3). The American man truly feels as if the child, if born, would not help, but hinder the relationship between him and Jig. He feels the child would require much effort without yielding any gain to the relationship. The American man states, “But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want any one else. And I know it’s perfectly simple” (Hemingway, 277). Hemingway, through having the American man make this statement, reveals that the man does not feel that the child will help the relationship, but instead will be a “white elephant” which will provide only negativity for their relationship.
Furthermore, just as Hemingway describes the hills as “white elephants” to represent how Jig and the man feel toward their relationship and the fetus, the hills also represent Jig’s feelings on the abortion itself. These “white elephant” hills surround both sides of the train station; therefore, it is important to note that despite how Jig views the individual hills and their different characteristics, she still views both sides as white elephants (Justice, 2). Hemingway suggests through making both sides white elephants that while one decision might yield something positive, she will still lose some aspect of either her personal life or her relationship with the man. The hills on either side of the train station have different landscape characteristics that Jig notices as she looks outside while talking to the American man. One side of the hills is dry and lifeless, while on the other side of the valley, the hills are green and full of vegetation. Through examining the individual characteristics of these hills that Jig explains in her thoughts while talking to the man, the reader can understand how Jig views the abortion.
Jig first views one side of the valley with hills that are white with no shade and no trees. While looking at the hills, Jig, who views the land while sitting in the shade, sees the land “brown and dry” and barren, without life (Hemingway, 273). The reader gains a negative connotation of this side of the station because of the lifelessness that Hemingway portrays at these hills. Indeed, the reader can infer that Jig relates this side of the station to the option of her having an abortion. Renner suggests that “[t]he choice of abortion is associated with the arid sterility of the hills on the barren side of the valley and by extension with the aimless, hedonistic life they had been leading” (4). The woman is thinking of her own body that will be lifeless and barren if she does receive the abortion. Hemingway, through using the setting of the dry, barren hills, suggests that Jig views the abortion as an option which will make her body barren and lifeless.
Hemingway also uses the location of Jig while viewing this land as an important key to understanding her thoughts on the abortion. The reader can infer that the woman does not think positively on having the abortion because of the fact that she is standing in the shade while viewing this land. Renner states that “readers must pay attention not only to what is said but also to where the characters are when they say it… This side of the station, facing out toward the hills on the same side of the valley, where ‘there was no shade and no trees,’ has been widely associated with the barrenness and sterility…of going through with an abortion” (3). Because Jig is sitting in the shade, the reader can infer that Jig is not satisfied with this option. Through the dry, barren hills, Hemingway symbolizes Jig’s negative feelings toward having the abortion.
Opposite the dry hills across the valley are fertile hills with life and vegetation. Hemingway writes, “Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of Ebro. Far away, beyond the trees, were mountains” (Hemingway, 276). In addition to having vegetation, the fertile land makes up the banks of the Ebro River. This river stands as “the archetypal symbol of the stream of life,” which possibly suggests the continuation of the life of the unborn fetus (Renner, 2). It is at this point where Jig begins to view her “pregnancy as a precious, even sacred, manifestation of the living power of nature” (Renner, 4). Jig begins to consider the possibility of having the child, which is represented not only through the living waters of the Ebro River, but the fertile lands of these hills.
In addition, it is important to consider the location from which Jig views these fertile hills. To view this land, she stands up and walks across to the other side of the station, where she leaves the shade. Jig enters the light, and “distances herself from the influence of her male companion and enables herself, for the first time, to realize what is in her own mind” (Renner, 4). It is possible that the light represents Jig’s preference not to have the abortion, but rather to have the child. The man, however, asks her to “come on back in the shade…You mustn’t feel that way” (Hemingway, 276). The man shows, through this statement, that he is not in favor of her fertility; rather, he wants her to step back into the shade, into the view of the barren land, and into the idea of having an abortion. Hemingway, through the use of the fertile land, shows the girl’s thoughts of possibly giving birth to the baby.
Ernest Hemingway, in “Hills Like White Elephants,” uses Jig’s thought processes concerning the surrounding landscape to provide insight into her indecision about her abortion. While the dry, barren land represents her thoughts on having the abortion, the fertile land represents her idea of abandoning the idea of the abortion and giving birth to the child. Even further, however, Hemingway uses her location while viewing the contrasting sides of the valley to suggest her personal opinion on the abortion. Scholars suggest that the setting alone can provide enough information so that the reader can decide if Jig has the abortion or gives birth to the child. The key to understanding the couple’s decision lies in interpreting what the man does with the baggage and which side of the station he places the luggage. At the end of the short story, the “man moves the bags to the ‘other’ side (and incidentally, into the light)” (Justice, 7). Justice suggests that through this movement of stepping into the light, the man accepts the fact that Jig wants to give birth to the unborn child. Jig remains the sole contact to the symbolic meaning of the setting until the end of the story, when Hemingway brings the man into the light. Through stepping into the light, he shows that the man is seeing the woman’s side of the abortion situation and is accepting her decision to give birth. Hemingway travels through the couple’s thought processes, showing how the landscape represents their various feelings toward giving birth to the unborn child or aborting the child.
