When We Talk About Love Analysis

“Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it” a quote by Rabindranath Tagore, summarizes the themes implemented in “Hills like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway, and “What we Talk About When we Talk About Love” by Raymond Carver. These two stories, contain a husband and wife who attempt to decipher the meaning of love. Hemingway’s characters do this subliminally, whereas Carver’s character’s discuss the meaning in a much broader fashion. Both authors have similar writing strategies, but have a few differing literary techniques. These two aforementioned stories, use similar structures and setting, but contrast in their use of symbols, to convey the author’s negative attitudes of love through their themes. First of all, Hemingway utilizes dialogue as his main structure alongside few descriptions of the setting, to emphasize his negative outlook on love. His theme is that of, people should not talk, but rather communicate in order to love one another. This theme is applied through, what …show more content…
His theme being that, people are unable to conceptualize a genuine meaning of love. Considering people are unable to do something, shows the negative connotation of his theme, that the character’s conversations dictate. For instance, Mel the cardiologist, comments about Terri’s previous relationship saying, “That’s not love, and you know it”(331), but Terri thinks otherwise, “Say what you want to, but I know it was”(331). The characters have opposing viewpoints on love so they are unable to come to a conclusion on what love is. For Terri, she felt her ex-husband loved her but when Mel looks at the relationship from an outside perspective he thinks that being abused is not love. The abusive relationship the characters converse about helps to enunciate the negative mood associated with Carver’s