$ $ An Appreciation about Hills Like White Elephants.

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An Appreciation about An Appreciation about

Hills Like White Hills Like White Elephants Elephants

$$About the Author

Ernest Miller Hemingway

(July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) in a strict family with distinctly middle-class values and oppressive sense of morality.

left home and began reporting for the Kansas City tar.

literary style during his years as a reporter, writing in short, factual sentences.

most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s,

the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

“Hills Like White Elephants” in 1927, in the book of Men Without Women.

$$Iceberg theory

The facts float above water; the supporting structure and symbolism operate out of sight.

Just as the visible tip of an iceberg hides a far greater mass of ice underneath the ocean surface, so does Hemingway’s dialogue belie the unstated tension between his characters.

Hemingway: "You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood."

The more a writer strips away, the more powerful the “iceberg,” or story, becomes.

The Art of the Short Story

$$Plots and Analysis

In accordance with his 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 in the short story of Hills Like White Elephants.

Both the American man and the girl speak in short sentences and rarely utter more than a few words at a time

These elements leave the characters’ thoughts and feelings completely up to the reader’s own interpretations.

Its simplicity also avoids fewer misleading words paint a truer picture of what lies beneath.

$$1. Symbolism—White Elephants

A white elephant symbolizes something no one wants; A burdensome or costly possession, an object considered to be without use or value—in this story, the girl’s unborn child.

The girl later retracts this comment with the observation that the hills don’t really look like white elephants, she even says that the hills only seemed to look like white elephants at first glance.

$$2.Symbolism—the train station.

Hemingway sets the story at a train station to highlight the fact that the relationship between the American man and the girl is at a crossroad.

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.

$$3.Quotations

★ (1)“It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.”

★ (2) “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.”

$$4.Quotations

★ “What did you say?”★ “I said we could have everything.”★ “We can have everything.”★ “No, we can’t.”★ “We can have the whole world.”★ “No, we can’t.”★ “We can go everywhere.”★ “No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any

more.”★ “It’s ours.”★ “No it isn’t. And once they take it

away, you never get it back.”

$$The Theme

★ Men & women:the book Men Without Women

★ Choices in life and lovewhen faced with a major decision

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"I feel fine," "There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine."

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