“Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway tells a short story about an American man and a girl waiting for a train to arrive in Spain. While they wait, they sit down and have a few drinks. The man persists to talk about a problem they both need to figure out a solution to, but the woman is desperate to avoid committing to a resolution. The operation discussed in this story is an operation. A baby is the only thing that could possibly cause them distress and change their lives and relationship. The theme consists of an incessant miscommunication between the two. The author uses irony, point of view, and symbolism heavily in this story to accentuate this detail and hint at what the man so badly wants to get rid of and what decisions the
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Jig mentions that the hills in her visual look like “white elephants” (591). The white elephants she references allude to an elephant in the room, a common expression used to reference something that needs to be discussed yet both parties involved try so hard to ignore. A bit later, she continues talking about this elephant, saying, “They’re lovely hills. . . They don’t really look like white elephants. I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees.” Here, Jig implies that she really wouldn’t mind this elephant in the room, that upon reconsideration, it could be a lovely decision to keep the baby after all. In normal and straight forward conversation, an elephant would be completely irrelevant, and instead of inquiring what she could possibly mean about the landscape resembling any sort of circus animal, the American completely misses her references and eventually starts nagging Jig to get the abortion. This miscommunication, along with the part of the story where the man drinks a beer at the bar without the girl and returns to her to find out “nothing was wrong” with Jig while she was alone during that short time, foreshadows the demise likely to occur in their
Jig mentions that the hills in her visual look like “white elephants” (591). The white elephants she references allude to an elephant in the room, a common expression used to reference something that needs to be discussed yet both parties involved try so hard to ignore. A bit later, she continues talking about this elephant, saying, “They’re lovely hills. . . They don’t really look like white elephants. I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees.” Here, Jig implies that she really wouldn’t mind this elephant in the room, that upon reconsideration, it could be a lovely decision to keep the baby after all. In normal and straight forward conversation, an elephant would be completely irrelevant, and instead of inquiring what she could possibly mean about the landscape resembling any sort of circus animal, the American completely misses her references and eventually starts nagging Jig to get the abortion. This miscommunication, along with the part of the story where the man drinks a beer at the bar without the girl and returns to her to find out “nothing was wrong” with Jig while she was alone during that short time, foreshadows the demise likely to occur in their