Hills Like White Elephants Rhetorical Analysis

In “Hills Like White Elephants”, Ernest Hemingway talks about a couple facing their relationship’s conflicts. He includes displeasing words and phrases to indicate the protagonists’ relationship has come to an end. The story’s central idea is that communication is the key for a long-lasting relationship. In this story, the physical setting, the use of language, and the tone affect Ernest Hemingway’s central idea by providing readers hints that the two main characters will go their separate ways when the train arrives. The isolating setting of the train station symbolizes the couple’s disagreement on the abortion. Beside from the setting, the couple’s conversation about beer in the first half of the story showed the American man and the girl are refusing to discuss their issue of what to do with the girl’s pregnancy. The combination of the seclusive …show more content…
He describes the hills on one side of the train station as “long and white”, and on the other side, “there was no shade and no trees” (Hemingway 228). The story takes place at a train station; a stopping point from Barcelona and Madrid. The station is located “between the two lines of rails in the sun” (Hemingway 228). The narration of the surrounding alone portrayed a calm and quite setting, however, it is repulsive due to the lack of shaded area under the hot sun. The isolating setting affects the writer’s main idea by giving readers a sense of awkward silence between the two main characters. The train station; a place where passengers have to decide whether to continue their adventure together or to say goodbye. Like the nature of a train at a crossroads, the protagonists must decide what to do with their relationship. According to Leslie Fiedler, “Hemingway learned to write ‘through the eye rather than the ear’” (Poetry Foundation). Hemingway’s descriptive setting is to help readers visualize the surrounding rather than just read the