Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants Analysis

Ernest Hemingway was a super star of the 1900s. His work, his life, and his purpose to the world taught people to not just sit around and work your life away, but that your life can be your work. Hemingway was a newspaper article writer, world war one and two veteran, worked in Paris while James Joyce, Ep Scott Fitzgerald, and T.S. Eliot were all there doing their own work, and was also a newspaper war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. His early career, as a newspaper journalist, influenced how he would later style his literature. His work was short and to the point, with sentences that did not look anything like other writers of his time whom wrote long, lengthy sentences such as this one. He won the Pulitzer Prize, and a Nobel Prize in literature.

 

He was known as the “Master of Dialogue” because he would not only make it easy to understand what was being said, he also made sure that what was said was being repeated multiple times. Ernest wanted to make sure that everyone knew what was going on, as opposed to other writers of the time who did not care what the normal Joe could comprehend.

Hemingway’s life as a whole was a reflection of his work. He became immersed in bad habits, such as boozing, that made him eventually fall into a literary rut. He did not believe a person should live and not be efficient so he killed himself. Like his work, short and concise.

In his Hills Like White Elephants, if the reader knows what a white elephant symbolized, than the story is quite easy to catch on to. Fortunately, I knew this key information and picked up on the title and the way the girl uses the words. This story is talking of an abortion and the struggle a couple, or maybe two people who had a one night stand, to come to a conclusion of whether to kill the baby or not. I found the story interesting, and like the past story, A Goodman is Hard to Find, I watched a short film of the work to reassure myself I had not misjudged the contents of the literature. UMMMM. Two symbols from the story were the beer and the white elephants, the white elephants symbolizing an unwanted item and the beer symbolizing the death of an unborn baby.

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