Hills Like White Elephants
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"Hills Like White Elephants" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway.
The story takes place in the Ebro river valley in Spain. A man and a woman make seemingly casual conversation while waiting in a small train station for their train to arrive. The story is told almost entirely through the couple's dialogue. The woman's name is Jig but the man's name is never mentioned, we only know that he is an American. The two are apparently a couple. They drink beer and a liquor called Anis del Toro while waiting.
At first glance the story may appear anticlimactic and not particularly interesting. Their conversation starts out being fairly mundane, if testy. Soon, however, the reader discovers that the topic that is being discussed by the two is an abortion. Hemingway uses the plain language to disguise the topic but also to show the characters' inability to cope with the issue. Though the conversation seems quite brief, it takes place over the course of approximately 35 minutes, with Hemingway leaving it largely to the reader to construe the silences. Consistent with the oblique style of the conversation, Hemingway never makes explicit the outcome, whether the couple will go forward with an abortion or not.
The name of the story comes from a comment made by the woman about the hills she sees looking like white elephants. "White elephant" is also possibly a metaphor in the story for the unborn child.
| Ernest Hemingway Books |
| Novels: The Torrents of Spring | The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta) | A Farewell to Arms | To Have and Have Not | For Whom the Bell Tolls | Across the River and Into the Trees | The Old Man and the Sea | Adventures of a Young Man | Islands in the Stream | The Garden of Eden |
| Non Fiction: Death in the Afternoon | Green Hills of Africa | The Dangerous Summer | A Moveable Feast | Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961 | Under Kilimanjaro |
| Short Story Books: Three Stories and Ten Poems | In Our Time | Men Without Women | The Snows of Kilimanjaro | Winner Take Nothing | The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories | The Essential Hemingway | The Hemingway Reader | The Nick Adams Stories | The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway | Collected Stories |
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