From the refined, Shakespearean romance of Romeo and Juliet to the more modern Batman villain duo Harley Quinn and The Joker, fictional relationships have been known to capture our hearts for decades. But what lies beneath the surface of these seemingly wonderful pairings can only be shown through the characters themselves. In the classic short story Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway, characters play an important and necessary role. With little plot or background information to follow, readers must rely on the descriptions of the main characters and their surroundings to understand the tone of the writing. This story involves only two main characters: “The girl” and “The American”, and much like the couples mentioned previously, these two do not work
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The way Hemingway typically portrays men in his works creates a compelling foil to the compliant and meek girl the story opened with. The ideal American man, taking control when he can, is a standard character in Hemingway’s work (Strychacz). By developing the relationship between the two main characters, Hemingway could show the contrast between them and the growth of the one versus the stagnancy of the other. On a related note, the title of this piece holds deeper meaning than at first glance. By making the casual remark “the mountains look like white elephants” (Hemingway 476), the girl metaphorically brought up the avoided topic at hand: her pregnancy. She conforms again though by retracting that statement and declaring the mountains maybe do not look like white elephants, symbolising an unwanted burden, but instead are “lovely hills” (476). Readers may interpret the observation alternatively as exemplifying the man in the relationship, becoming more of a hassle than a crutch. Either way, the girl questions her current situation with him and where it will lead, is this more than she bargained
The way Hemingway typically portrays men in his works creates a compelling foil to the compliant and meek girl the story opened with. The ideal American man, taking control when he can, is a standard character in Hemingway’s work (Strychacz). By developing the relationship between the two main characters, Hemingway could show the contrast between them and the growth of the one versus the stagnancy of the other. On a related note, the title of this piece holds deeper meaning than at first glance. By making the casual remark “the mountains look like white elephants” (Hemingway 476), the girl metaphorically brought up the avoided topic at hand: her pregnancy. She conforms again though by retracting that statement and declaring the mountains maybe do not look like white elephants, symbolising an unwanted burden, but instead are “lovely hills” (476). Readers may interpret the observation alternatively as exemplifying the man in the relationship, becoming more of a hassle than a crutch. Either way, the girl questions her current situation with him and where it will lead, is this more than she bargained