Literary Elements In Ernest Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants

White Elephants can be seen as a blessing and a curse considering that since the color is rare, it is a burden since it can’t work and always has to get fed just like a newborn. Unplanned pregnancy is the theme that sets up the drive for the author Ernest Hemingway in his short story “Hills like white elephants”. The type of writing that Hemingway uses in order to accomplish his work is the iceberg theory, where the information that is given is used to seek the hidden meaning. Hemingway uses literary elements such as: allegory, diction, motif, and plot to unfold the decisions of a young woman when handling the pressures of an unborn child. The presence of the white elephant doesn’t prompt itself throughout the story, nor does the words unborn …show more content…
For example, the author presents “The American and the girl” this quote can be highlighted using diction to emphasize that the American shows his character as a foreigner and the girl shows her youth, but later on in the story uses woman to emphasize her age (229). Another example is “only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy.” (230). Hemingway allows the Americans dialogue to show the importance of the decision that the girl needs to make in context that she has the power to keep of kill the baby. Throughout the whole story Hemingway presents a lot of diction in order to highlight key points to highlight the issues that the American and the young girl had with being pregnant. Then after stating that the unborn child has made them both miserable diction is able to depict “...And afterwards they were all so happy.” (230). The diction of that line that the author implemented was to indicate sarcasm since the American really just doesn’t want the child and puts the sarcasm to emphasize how he is selfish and rather live his life than be stuck taking care of a