Hills Like White Elephants Analysis

In "What’s Up with the Title?" we break down the literal meaning of the components of what is for many the story’s key symbol – the "hills like white elephants." In "Setting" we t...

Though the exact location of the train station isn't given, we know that it's somewhere hilly (with an idyllic Ebro view) between Madrid and Barcelona. In fact, don’t experience much of Spain in...

The third-person narrator takes the fly-on-the-wall technique to extremes in "Hills Like White Elephants." We can see both the journalist and the storyteller in Hemingway working together to constr...

A man and a woman drink beers while waiting for a train to arrive. They bicker passive aggressively. The end.Yep—that sounds pretty realistic to us. One of the strengths—perhaps the key strengt...

The narration is super-controlled: we're given a bare minimum of information outside of the conversations between the man and Jig (and, briefly, between the man and the barmaid). There are no poeti...

In "Hills Like White Elephants," everything is boiled down and condensed. Hemingway's writing is journalistic and no-nonsense; he reports dialogue cleanly and directly, without any fluffy adjective...

Hoo boy. Where do we even begin with this one?We'll begin at the most basic level: the title refers to the comparison Jig makes between the pale hills of the Spanish landscape and white elephants....

"And they lived happily ever after."...is probably not the postscript to "Hills Like White Elephants."In the story, Jig seems to want to get married and have a baby. However, the American man seems...

A man and a woman are outside a bar having some drinks and waiting for a trainThe initial situation is really a view of some hills, but we thought we’d just skip right to the bar...which is wher...

It’s rare that we can’t use one of Booker’s Seven Basic Plots to shed new light on a story. But "Hills Like White Elephants" is a revolutionary approach to story writing—and perhaps even...

"Hills Like White Elephants" is a revolutionary approach to story writing, and perhaps even a reaction against stories that fit into traditional plot structures. As a result, this story can't be b...

Forget Elvis. Be a Hemingway impersonator! Learn more here.Hemingway’s books were burned by the Nazis. (Source)

The characters had to have had sex at least once or they wouldn’t be talking about pregnancy, abortion, and marriage. But this is pretty much the opposite of a sexy story. We definitely don't sug...