Ernest Hemingway

## Biography

Born in Illinois, Hemingway spent childhood vacations in Michigan on hunting and fishing trips. He volunteered for an ambulance unit in France during World War I, but was wounded and hospitalized for six months. After the war, as a war correspondent based in Paris, he met expatriate American writers Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. Stein, in particular, influenced his literary style. After his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) brought him fame, he covered the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the fighting in China in the 1940s. On a safari in Africa, he was badly injured when his small plane crashed; still, he continued to enjoy hunting and sport activities that inspired some of his best work. The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short poetic novel about a poor, old fisherman who heroically catches a huge fish devoured by sharks, won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953; the next year he received the Nobel Prize. Discouraged by a troubled family background, illness, and the belief that he was losing his gift for writing, Hemingway shot himself to death in 1961.

**Literal Style**

Hemingway is arguably the most popular American novelist of this century. His sympathies are basically apolitical and humanistic, and in this sense he is universal. His simple style makes his novels easy to comprehend, and they are often set in exotic surroundings. A believer in the **“cult of experience,”** Hemingway often involved his characters in dangerous situations in order to reveal their i**nner natures**; in his later works, the danger sometimes becomes an occasion for masculine assertion. Like Fitzgerald, **Hemingway became a spokesperson for his generation**. But instead of painting its fatal glamour as did Fitzgerald, who never fought in World War I, He**mingway wrote of war, death, and the “lost generation” of cynical survivors.** His characters are not dreamers but tough bullfighters, soldiers, and athletes. If intellectual, they are deeply scarred and disillusioned. His hallmark is a clean style devoid of unnecessary words. Often he uses **understatement:** In A Farewell to Arms (1929) the heroine dies in childbirth saying “I’m not a bit afraid. It’s just a dirty trick.” He once compared his writing to icebergs: “There is seven-eighths of it under water  for every part that shows.” Hemingway’s fine ear for dialogue and exact description shows in his excellent short stories, such as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Critical opinion, in fact, generally holds his short stories equal or superior to his novels. His best novels include The Sun Also Rises, about the demoralized life of expatriates after World War I; A Farewell to Arms, about the tragic love affair of an American soldier and an English nurse during the war; For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), set during the Spanish Civil War; and The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway created a style of writing admired by nearly every writer of fiction in English, and he left that style as perhaps his most important legacy. He made the short, declarative sentence an ideal for legions of subsequent writers. It has been said that half of all 20th-century American writers tried to imitate Hemingway’s style and the other half tried not to.

**The Iceberg Theory and Hemingway’s Style**

The **iceberg theory** or **theory of omission** is a writing technique coined by American writer Ernest Hemingway. As a young journalist, Hemingway had to focus his newspaper reports on immediate events, with very little context or interpretation. When he became a writer of short stories, he retained this minimalistic style, focusing on surface elements without explicitly discussing underlying themes. Hemingway believed the deeper meaning of a story should not be evident on the surface, but should shine through implicitly.

In 1923, Hemingway conceived of the idea of a new theory of writing after finishing his short story "Out of Season". In *A Moveable Feast* (1964), his posthumously published memoirs about his years as a young writer in Paris, he explains: "I omitted the real end [of "Out of Season"] which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything... and the omitted part would strengthen the story." In chapter sixteen of *Death in the Afternoon* he compares his theory about writing to an iceberg

“If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.” – Hemingway, *Death in the Afternoon*

“Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.” *–* Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway said that only the tip of the iceberg showed in fiction—your reader will see only what is above the water—but the knowledge that you have about your character that never makes it into the story acts as the bulk of the iceberg. And that is what gives your story weight and gravitas.

— Jenna Blum in *The Author at Work*, 2013

Jenna Blum, 2013, *The Modern Scholar* published by Recorded Books, *The Author at Work: The Art of Writing Fiction*, Disk 1, Track 9,

Many first-time readers read “Hills Like White Elephants” as nothing more than a casual conversation between two people waiting for a train and therefore, miss the unstated dramatic tension lurking between each line. As a result, many people do not realize that the couple is actually talking about having an abortion and going their separate ways. In accordance with his so-called Iceberg Theory, Hemingway stripped everything but the bare essentials from his stories and novels, leaving readers to sift through the remaining dialogue and bits of narrative on their own. Just as the visible tip of an iceberg hides a far greater mass of ice underneath the ocean surface, so does Hemingway’s dialogue uncover the unstated tension between his characters. In fact, Hemingway firmly believed that perfect stories conveyed far more through subtext than through the actual words written on the page. The more a writer strips away, the more powerful the “iceberg,” or story, becomes.

Hemingway stripped so much from his stories that many of his contemporary critics complained that his fiction was little more than snippets of dialogue strung together. In “Hills Like White Elephants,” for example, both the American man and the girl speak in short sentences and rarely utter more than a few words at a time. Hemingway also avoids using dialogue tags, such as “he said” or “she said,” and skips any internal monologues. These elements leave the characters’ thoughts and feelings completely up to the reader’s own interpretations. Hemingway’s fans, however, have lauded his style for its simplicity, believing that fewer misleading words paint a truer picture of what lies beneath.

## Historical & Cultural Context

**Europe Between the Wars**

Hemingway wrote “Hills Like White Elephants” in 1926 while living in Paris. Europe between the First and Second World Wars provided the historical and cultural context for the story. Hemingway was twenty-two, newly married and ready to begin a career as a serious writer when he arrived in Paris in 1921. His experiences as an ambulance driver during World War I continued to affect him as well as his sense of alienation and isolation characteristic of modernist writing which can be found in the writing he produced during these years.

Europe was in the process of recovering from the the war; however, it was a time of political and economic upheaval for most of the nations. Many nations suffered political struggles as each side attempted to wrest control of their particular countries. In Italy, for example, strikes, violence, and political unrest led to the 1922 Fascist March on Rome. Mussolini established himself as dictator in that country. In Germany, the heavy reparations called for in the Treaty of Versailles that ended WWI caused economic chaos. The German mark steadily lost ground as the rate of inflation spiraled upward. .The other nations of Europe with their countryside scarred and their young men dead or wounded, reeled under a deep and severe recession.

**The Lost Generation**

In the United States, however, the economy boomed. The stock market reached dizzying heights and the dollar enjoyed an extremely favorable rate of exchange with most European currencies. In addition, many young Americans had been in Europe during the War, allowing them to feel more comfortable in the different cultures. A**rmed with the strong American dollar and the familiarity with the language and culture, many writers found Paris a very attractive milieu—collectively, these writers became known as the “Lost Generation.”** According to Michael Reynolds, some six thousand Americans lived in Paris at the end of 1921; by “September 1924, the city’s permanent American population was thirty thousand and rising.” **Hemingway brushed shoulders with many notable writers and literary figures while in Paris, including Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce, among others.**

**Hemingway himself popularized the idea of a lost generation through his first novel, The Sun Also Rises**. In his later memoir of the Paris years, A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes of a conversation he had with the writer Gertrude Stein in which she called all young people who had been in the war “a lost generation.” Subsequently, Hemingway used Stein’s comment as one of two epigraphs that open the book. Hemingway, perhaps better than any other writer of his generation, **captured the sense of waste and loss and the resulting aimlessness that the War engendered in the young people of his era.**

**Social Change**

The years between the war were ones of rapid social change. In the United States, the economic boom caused by easy credit and technology allowed people to own products as never before. Middle class people were able to own cars, radios, and telephones.

Social change was reflected in other important ways as well. Perhaps most important, women received the right to vote in 1920 and entered the work force in growing numbers. Women bared their legs, lit up cigarettes, and cut their hair. Such expressions of emancipation threatened traditional male values, and the clash between the genders figured in many of the literary works of the day.

Many writers left the United States, preferring the less restrictive morality of Europe. Disillusioned with civilized society, alienated from traditional values, and shell-shocked from a brutal War, these writers experimented with literary form, content, and style.

## Hills like White Elephants

"Hills Like White Elephants" is a **short story by Ernest Hemingway**. It was f**irst published in August 1927,** in the l**iterary magazine transition.**

“Hills Like White Elephants” opens with a long description of the story’s setting in a train station surrounded by hills, fields, and trees in a valley in Spain. A man known simply as the American and his girlfriend sit at a table outside the station, waiting for a train to Madrid.

It is hot, and the man orders two beers. The girl remarks that the nearby hills look like white elephants, to which the American responds that he’s never seen one. They order more drinks and begin to bicker about the taste of the alcohol. The American chastises her and says that they should try to enjoy themselves. The girl replies that she’s merely having fun and then retracts her earlier comment by saying the hills don’t actually look like white elephants to her anymore.

They order more drinks, and the American mentions that he wants the girl, whom he calls “Jig,” to have an operation, although he never actually specifies what kind of operation. He seems agitated and tries to downplay the operation’s seriousness. He argues that the operation would be simple, for example, but then says the procedure really isn’t even an operation at all.

The girl says nothing for a while, but then she asks what will happen after she’s had the operation. The man answers that things will be fine afterward, just like they were before, and that it will fix their problems. He says he has known a lot of people who have had the operation and found happiness afterward. The girl dispassionately agrees with him. The American then claims that he won’t force her to have the operation but thinks it’s the best course of action to take. She tells him that she will have the operation as long as he’ll still love her and they’ll be able to live happily together afterward.

The man then emphasizes how much he cares for the girl, but she claims not to care about what happens to herself. The American weakly says that she shouldn’t have the operation if that’s really the way she feels. The girl then walks over to the end of the station, looks at the scenery, and wonders aloud whether they really could be happy if she has the operation. They argue for a while until the girl gets tired and makes the American promise to stop talking.

The Spanish bartender brings two more beers and tells them that the train is coming in five minutes. The girl smiles at the bartender but has to ask the American what she said because the girl doesn’t speak Spanish. After finishing their drinks, the American carries their bags to the platform and then walks back to the bar, noticing all the other people who are also waiting for the train. He asks the girl whether she feels better. She says she feels fine and that there is nothing wrong with her.

**Setting**

Hemingway sets “Hills Like White Elephants” at a train station to highlight the fact that the relationship between the American man and the girl is at a crossroads. Planted in the middle of a desolate valley, the station isn’t a final destination but merely a stopping point between Barcelona and Madrid. Travelers, including the main characters, must therefore decide where to go and, in this case, whether to go with each other and continue their relationship. Moreover, the contrast between the white hills and barren valley possibly highlights the dichotomy between life and death, fertility and sterility, and mirrors the choice the girl faces between having the baby or having the abortion. The girl seems torn between the two landscapes, not only commenting on the beauty of the hills but also physically walking to the end of the platform and gazing out at the brown emptiness around the station.

**Characters**

**The American:** Throughout the story, the American behaves according to **Hemingway’s rigid conception of masculinity.** Hemingway portrays the American as a rugged man’s man—knowledgeable, worldly, and always in control of himself and the situation at hand. Even when vexed or confused, he maintains his cool and feigns indifference, such as when he tells the girl he doesn’t care whether she has the operation. He initially avoids discussion of their problems, but when pressured, he tackles them head on by oversimplifying the operation and relentlessly pushing her to have it. Thinking himself to be the more reasonable of the two, he patronizes the girl and fails to provide the sympathy and understanding she needs during the crisis. Uncompromising, he seems to identify more with the other passengers “waiting reasonably” at the station than with his own girlfriend at the end of the story, which suggests that the two will go their separate ways.

**The Girl:** Compared to the American, Hemingway’s overly masculine character, the girl is less assertive and persuasive. Throughout the story, the girl appears helpless, confused, and indecisive. She changes her mind about the attractiveness of the surrounding hills, For example, the girl can’t even order drinks from the bartender on her own without having to rely on the man’s ability to speak Spanish. Ironically, the girl seems to understand that her relationship with the American has effectively ended, despite her professed desire to make him happy. She knows that even if she has the operation, their relationship won’t return to how it used to be. In many ways, the girl’s realization of this fact gives her power over the American, who never really understands why they still can’t have “the whole world” like they once did.

**The Waitress:** Throughout the story the girl and the man sit drinking outside the train station bar where the woman is their waitress. Throughout the man and the girl’s conversation about whether to get an abortion, the woman comes and goes bringing them beer and liquor. The woman speaks only Spanish, though Hemingway writes her words as English, and the man must translate the woman’s words for the girl. This situation requiring the man’s translation for the girl characterizes the relationship between the man and the girl and the man’s position of power over her

**Themes**

**The limits of language**: As in most of his fiction, Hemingway is interested in where language breaks down between individuals and how what is unsaid or what is unspeakable can define and divide individuals. At a purely stylistic level, Hemingway exposes the inadequacy of language through his use of unnamed characters and minimalist, stripped down sentences. Without using details to describe how “the man” or “the girl” look or sound, Hemingway instead chooses to focus almost exclusively on the dialogue between the two characters to suggest the growing alienation between them. The story’s very title of “Hills Like White Elephants,” with its use of simile to gesture at the story’s underlying tension of a pregnancy neither character feels able to directly mention, reflects the characters’ critical loss for words. Beyond narrative style, the conversation between “the man” and “the girl” hinges on the inadequacy of what they can say or not say to one another. The man continually misunderstands or contradicts the girl, to the point that the girl begs him to stop talking at all. Though they mirror each other’s language, repeating the same words, the effect is as of an echo chamber—words repeated meaninglessly without actual communication. Finally, the looming decision that drives the whole story—whether or not the girl will get an abortion—goes unnamed by either character. They both allude to it but seem unable to discuss it directly, allowing the conversation to lapse into silences or angry outbursts instead. An added layer to the issue of the failure of language in this story is the fact that the events are unfolding between two English-speaking tourists in Spain. Throughout the story as the characters drink, the waitress intermittently enters the scene, speaking in Spanish, which the man must translate for the girl. This situation draws attention to the idea of translation, and yet also underscores how, ironically, even though they speak the same language, it is the man and girl who are in the most need of a translator.

> “Dos cervezas,” the man said into the curtain.
>
>

The American sets the scene in one of the first lines of dialogue in the story. The American and his girlfriend sit at a bar at the train station, a curtain separating the outdoor tables from the inside of the bar to keep flies out. Here, the American calls to the bartender to bring two beers. However, the narrator observes that the American speaks to the curtain, implying that while these characters seem to speak to each other, a wall separates them that makes understanding each other impossible.

> Can’t we maybe stop talking?
>
>

After the man repeats his opinion on his girlfriend’s possible operation, the girl cuts him off and asks if they can stop talking. However, he ignores her request and resumes what he had been about to say. She pleads with him to stop talking, and again he does not listen. His refusal to stop talking shows that, although he may think they need to have a conversation, he doesn’t listen and she doesn’t want to hear what he has to say.

**Choice**: Significantly, this story unfolds as the man and the girl wait at a station for a train to Madrid. The heat is oppressive and the two are forced to wait, drinking away the afternoon till the train arrives. This sense of agonizing waiting permeates the story from the setting itself—a hot, dry river valley at a literal crossroads—to the crucial decision the couple is trying to make: whether or not to have an abortion. To leave or to stay, to embrace parenthood or to reject it,to give up one’s own desires for the desires of another, are key decisions at play here.The delayed resolution of these decisions forms the driving action of the story.

“Well,” the man said, “if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.”

After the man brings up the mysterious operation that he wants his girlfriend to have, he repeatedly makes passive-aggressive comments similar to this quote. While admitting the decision to have the operation rests with her, he promotes the procedure as safe and simple. Although he never clearly states what he wants, he clearly lobbies for her to have the operation as he will not stop bringing the idea up. But rather than revealing his true intentions, he dances around the topic, leaving her to ultimately make the decision. In this way, he uses communication as a manipulation tactic.

**Freedom vs. Family:** As the story makes clear from the beginning, both the man and the girl are accustomed to a free, uncommitted lifestyle. When the man looks at their combined luggage, it is covered with “labels…from all the hotels where they had spent nights.” The two of them have spent a long time traveling together, going wherever they wanted without restriction. The decision to carry through with the girl’s pregnancy and create a family would completely alter the nature of their relationship. They would have to settle down. Rather than spending nights in hotel after hotel, they would have to build a home of their own. The man very definitively doesn’t want to “settle down” in this way, and thinks it will be easy not to. He is firm in his conviction that this pregnancy is “the only thing that’s made us unhappy” and that getting the abortion will be “perfectly simple” and “perfectly natural.” In a sense, he thinks that the pregnancy is something they can just leave behind the way they would leave a hotel they’d already stayed in. The girl, on the other hand, maintains a wholly different attitude toward her pregnancy. To her, having a child with her partner promises a world where “we could have everything,” an altogether different definition of freedom. Ultimately, however, she tentatively agrees to the procedure, surrendering her own freedom of choice to a different sort of idea of “family,” as she hopes that doing so will restore the man’s love for her. The story implies, though, through the girl’s initial resistance and then her perhaps too-strong statement that nothing is wrong, that the girl will not be able to so “freely” move on from the pregnancy, and that the man’s insistence on maintaining his definition of freedom has impinged on the girl’s own freedom.

**Men, Women and Relationships:** At the heart of “Hills Like White Elephants” is Hemingway’s examination of the man and girl’s deeply flawed relationship, a relationship that champions “freedom” at the cost of honesty, respect, and commitment. In this sense, the man and girl represent stereotypes of male and female roles: the male as active and the female as passive. In this gender framework, the man makes the decisions and the female complies. However, as the story illustrates, such a power dynamic is fundamentally flawed and destructive. The man is domineering in all his interactions, andthough he pays lip service to wanting to make the girl happy, his decisions are ultimately guided by his own desires. He wants the girl to seekan abortion in order to maintain the freedom he enjoys, but he wants it to be her decision. For the man,it is not enough for her to do what he wants, but she must also want what he wants. The man seeks to control both the girl’s actions and intentions as though she were a child, a deeply unhealthy and damaging pattern of behavior. At first the girl is resistant to the man’s emotional manipulation. She attempts to paint a picture of the future life she and the man could have together if they were to have a child. The man, though, is unwilling even to entertain these notions, and yet he phrases his refusal in the manipulative language of love, claiming that “I don’t want anybody but you.” Eventually the girl acquiesces to the man’s overbearing insistence, surrendering her personal freedom to his wishes. At the story’s conclusion, when he asks her if she feels better, the girl’s stiff reply reveals her true feelings: “I feel fine. There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.” This final act of concealment and self-suppression suggests that this relationship, so representative of the traditional dynamic between men and women at the time will remain stalled in its present unhealthy stateuntil it likely falls apart completely.

**Symbols**

**White Elephants:** A white elephant symbolizes **something no one wants—in this story, the girl’s unborn child**. The girl’s comment in the beginning of the story that the surrounding hills look like white elephants initially seems to be a casual, offhand remark, but it actually serves as a segue for her and the American to discuss their baby and the possibility of having an abortion. The girl later retracts this comment with the observation that the hills don’t really look like white elephants, a subtle hint that perhaps she wants to keep the baby after all—a hint the American misses. In fact, she even says that the hills only seemed to look like white elephants at first glance, and that they’re actually quite lovely. Comparing the hills—and, metaphorically, the baby—to elephants also recalls the expression “the elephant in the room,” a euphemism for something painfully obvious that no one wants to discuss.

**Barren/Fertile land**: As the story opens, we are introduced first and foremost to the setting’s barren landscape, which is described as “brown and dry,” with “no shade” and “no trees.” Yet while the story feels as though it were taking place in a desert—both because of the literal dryness of the landscape and in **the sense of loneliness and alienation between the man and the woman—**we are told at the beginning that the story is in fact unfolding beside the Ebro River. And, as the girl notes, this is not a place totally devoid of beauty. She describes the hills along the river, in fact, as “lovely hills,” particularly “the coloring of their skin through the trees.” The girl, who is pregnant and on the precipice of deciding whether or not to end the pregnancy, is sensitive to the latent beauty and fertility of this environment, though both of these things are invisible to her male companion. **In this way the land itself represents both the girl with her possibility of motherhood and the conflicting barrenness of her relationship with a man who urges an abortion she doesn’t want.**

**Alcohol**: Drinking is the only **source of relief** that the man and the girl can find from both the harsh, hot sunlight and the complications of their own relationship. For such a short story, both characters consume an extraordinary amount of beer and liquor. In fact, the only pause in their bickering occurs when they are ordering or consuming their drinks. It is important to note, however, that alcohol is not portrayed as a positive force here. While water produces life and nurtures living things, making them grow, **the alcohol in the story affords only temporary relief—the relief of avoidance and the chance to briefly lose one’s self.**

**The Train Station**: In literature, crossroads often represent a situation in which a character needs to make **a crucial decision**—just as the character must choose a physical path, they must symbolically **choose a life path.** In this story the couple’s prolonged stay at a train station beside the Ebro river plays such a symbolic role. **Their wait at the train station suggests a stage of suspension**, the sense of things coming to an intolerable standstill until they resolve whether or not to get an abortion and, accordingly, which direction their relationship will go next.

## Intro Paragraph

The beginning to the twentieth saw Europe hosting one of the most horrifying political conflicts ever registered in the history of humanity: The First World War. This political conflict came to change not only the political display of the continent, but also the very set of beliefs ruling society. The institutions that once had promised to bring protection were proven a failure, leaving behind a sense of dread and fragmentation that did not vanish with the end of the war. It is in this context in which a brand new social, intellectual, and artistic ideas emerge to reflect the reality of a broken world, all comprised in what is today called the modernist movement. In literature, modernism attempted to break the rules, create new formats and reject the traditions that were deemed as useless and limiting. This often meant the adoption of free verse in poetry and more ironic, chaotic, allusive pieces meant to be understood only by an elite part of society. Among the key figures of the modernist movement stands Ernest Hemingway, an American novelist and journalist known by his masterful exploration of deep, mundane topics throughout simple, minimalist language. Hemingway developed a literary style that he appointed as the iceberg theory, through which he attempted to let the very meaning of his pieces be hidden under the veil of a seemingly simpler plot, encouraging an active audience to involve their emotions in the experience of discovery. Nowhere better seen the talented use of this technique than in his masterpiece “Hills like White Elephants”, a short story that explores the relationship of an American man and his evidently sorrowful girlfriend. The main characters engage in a discussion that takes the most avid readers to the understanding of the fact that the woman is being encouraged to undergo an abortion, although the name of the procedure is never mentioned in the story. With outstanding talent, Hemingway is able to guide the audience into the true meaning of the piece throughout the use of a powerful symbol and the very lack of communication between the characters.

One of the clearest clues of the true themes explored through “Hills like White Elephants” can be hidden behind symbolic elements.

-Some of the phrases said by the woman

-The symbol of white elephants

-Changing her mind

-The symbol of the lights and the shadows

-Opposite thoughts on pregnancy

-Alcohol

-Concluding

The very lack of wording also constitutes enough clues for the audience to understand that there is a deeper meaning in the speech of the characters.

-Hemingway and wording

-No mentioning of the word abortion - synonyms

-Lack of communication, the man refusing to speak

-The man does not want to seem overly persuasive

-Language barrier

-The woman asks him not to speak

### MLA citation

Hemingway, Ernest. *Death in the Afternoon*. 1923. Jonathan Cape, 1958.

Hemingway, Ernest. "Hills like White Elephants." 1927. *The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway*. Scribner, 1987.