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José Flávio Nogueira Guimarães
POETRY IN HEMINGWAY’S
“Hills Like White Elephants”
Trabalho apresentado à displina
“Tópicos em Literatura de Língua
Inglesa: O Conto (séculos XIX e
XX)” como parte dos requisitos
para obtenção dos créditos.
Belo Horizonte
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
2004
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There are lots of people who have a hard time to tell someone bad news or even to talk
about a delicate or heavy subject. But some people are artists and they deal with misfortune as
if they were dealing with the happiest news. This is what we call rhetoric. They know how to
transform raw material into the most delicious dish on earth. They know how to manipulate
and play with the words giving new meanings to them. They transform ordinary words into
poetry.
This is what I want to prove. I want to attest that the narrator in “Hills Like White
Elephants” deals with a very heavy subject, abortion, which is not unraveled in the story but
concealed among words. He makes good use of his rhetoric and what could be a disagreeable
and unpleasant story turns out to be a poetical one. The author’s poetic style and form stand
out in this short story and become the “main character.” It is unquestionable that we are
before a Hemingway’s text, one of his masterpieces.
First of all, I would like to talk about the setting. The story takes place in Spain. The
valley of the Ebro is mentioned in the first line, as well as the cities of Barcelona and Madrid
in the last two lines of the first paragraph. The whole story occurs at a bar near the junction of
two railroads along which the express from Barcelona came and stopped there for two
minutes and went to Madrid.
The two characters of the story, an American man and a girl named Jig sat at a table at
the bar and drank beer. Before them lay hills across the valley of the Ebro. They were long
and white in the sun. They contrasted with the country which was brown and dry. According
to the girl the hills looked like white elephants. This sentence will have different meanings
throughout the short story. I will talk about them later on. The hills will be the “stars” of the
setting as well.
The bead curtain is a very important prop in the story, too. It stands for a barrier. It
separates two worlds: the known and the unknown, the private and the public, the unraveled
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and the mystery. Beads are also used in chaplets or rosaries for counting prayers, the time.
The bead curtain keeps readers away from a secret: What is the girl hiding? What will she do
with the baby she seems to be expecting? Will she abort the American’s baby? Will she keep
it? The bead curtain kept out flies which are intruders who want to dirt what is clean. Readers
are the flies who cannot pierce the veil, the bead curtain, to unravel the abortion mystery and
dirt the whole story making all poetry vanish.
Notwithstanding, there is a man and a girl in a bar at a train station waiting on a train
which will take them to Madrid where the girl who is pregnant will undergo an abortion. They
talk and chat but never spell the entire truth out. The mystery is kept. The bead curtain hinders
readers from knowing the truth. The enchantment is kept. The poetic style carries the story
out painting a beautiful picture and the “hills like white elephants” change colors every time
they are mentioned.
The first time the girl mentions the hills looked like white elephants, she means that
she knew her intercourse with the American could turn out into a pregnancy but she did not
dare to think it would come true.
The second time the girl says the mountains looked like white elephants, she means
she did not expect anything really special from the intercourse with the American, “it would
just taste like licorice”, perhaps. She just wanted to try something new. Actually, afterwards,
the American was not really what he seemed to be.
The warm wind blows the bead curtain against the table. It is a threat. The truth may
come up. Yet, the veil is still there hindering readers from hearing the truth.
In the middle of the story, the girl looks at the bead curtain again, puts her hand out
and takes hold of two of the strings of beads - a few lines before the truth had been partly told.
They talked about a simple operation: “It’s just to let the air in,” says the American trying to
talk Jig, the girl, into undergoing an abortion. When jig takes hold of two strings of beads, she
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is as if praying to God for light to come and help her decide whether she aborts the baby or
not.
The third and last time Jig talks about white elephants, she states things were like
white elephants. Just before that statement, she asks the American if she underwent an
abortion, he would still like it. What does she mean by that? She may be asking the American
whether there will be hope for their relationship after the abortion or not; whether there will
be dreams between them or not; whether there will be poetry in their lives or not; whether she
will still be able to see beauty where there is not any or not.
In the last lines of the short story the American leaves the bar to take the bags over to
the other side of the station. Jig stays at the bar drinking at the table. When he comes back he
goes through the bead curtain. He crosses the borderline of two different worlds. He gets into
a new dimension, the realm of poetry where everything is possible, where kindness and
happiness are exhaled from the characters’ lungs. Now Jig feels fine. There is nothing wrong
with her. She feels fine. The reader may be asking about her future, the operation, the
abortion. Nevertheless, that subject must be avoided for the sake of the poetic style. The
picture is ready. Mystery is necessary. Those were the final strikes of the narrator’s
paintbrush. That was how the author ended the story. The painting is beautiful now! The hills
really look like white elephants. Poetry prevailed.
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Works Cited
Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants.” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.
Ed. Richard Bausch and R. V. Cassill. New York and London: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2006. 335-39.