Hills Like White Elephants (Style)

Style

Setting

In “Hills Like White Elephants” the setting serves both to locate the story in space and time and to function as an important symbol. The story is set in Spain, in the valley of the Ebro River. More immediately, the setting is a railway station “between two lines of rails in the sun.” The American and the girl sit at a table. On one side of the station, the land is parched and desolate. A number of critics have noted the similarity between this landscape and that of T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. On the other side of the station, there are trees and grain. By dividing the setting in half, with one side sterile and the other fertile, Hemingway uses the setting to reinforce the division between the couple. They can choose sterility through the abortion, or fertility through the pregnancy. The landscape outside the couple’s conversation reflects the inner landscapes of the relationship.

Dialogue

The most striking feature of this story is that it is constructed almost entirely of dialogue. There are only seven short descriptive paragraphs that are not part of the dialogue itself. Further, there is very little action in the story: the girl walks from one side of the station to the other, they drink beer, and the man moves the luggage. By controlling the narrative so tightly, Hemingway forces the reader to participate in the scene almost as an eavesdropper. The reader “hears” the dialogue, but cannot break into the characters’ inner thoughts. With so little else present, the weight and the meaning of the story depend on the reader’s ability to decipher the cryptic comments the two characters make to each other. Hemingway himself once suggested that a short story is like the tip of an iceberg, the meaning of the story submerged beneath the written text. Certainly in “Hills Like White Elephants,” only the smallest portion of the story’s subject is apparent, and the reader must guess at the rest.

Lost Generation

The term “Lost Generation” has come to apply to a group of young writers, most born around 1900, who fought in the First World War. As a group, the Lost Generation found that their understanding of life had been severely affected by their experiences during the war. Many of the Lost Generation lived in Europe, notably in Paris, during the post-War period. The term came from a comment that Gertrude Stein made to Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation.” Hemingway used the comment as a epigraph in his novel, The Sun Also Rises. Other writers included in this group are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hart Crane, Louis Bromfield, and Malcolm Cowley.

The aimlessness of the characters in “Hills Like White Elephants” is one of the characteristics of the fiction of the Lost Generation. Jig and the Americans are expatriates, moving from place to place to “look at things and try new drinks.” They are people who live in hotels, out of luggage, rather than being rooted in one place. The lack of rootedness, then, becomes an important motif in the literature of this generation.

Topics for Further Study

• Read The Sun Also Rises and the other stories in Men Without Women. How do you characterize the human relationships portrayed by Hemingway in the books? What different kinds of relationships does Hemingway explore?
• Investigate the American expatriate community in Paris during the years 1920 through 1929. Who are the members of the community? What is their relationship to each other? How did their close affiliation affect their writing?
• The Treaty of Versailles ended the hostilities of the First World War. However, many historians argue that the terms of the treaty made the Second World War inevitable. Investigate the treaty and the years between the wars. Describe the connections between the Treaty of Versailles and movement toward World War II.
• The role and status of women changed dramatically during the years from 1920-1929. Investigate this shift by looking at representations of women in art, music, and literature. What does this investigation reveal about the relationship between the sexes at this time?
• Visit an art gallery, or check out books on art from your library. Examine art produced during the years between 1920 and 1929. How is this work different from the work produced during the last half of the nineteenth century? What might account for the dramatic shifts?