The short story “Hills Like White Elephants” relationships between a young girl and her boyfriend who try to solve the problem of romantic love and further relations. This short story is based on symbolism and vivid images which add emotional tension to the story. Two academic essays, Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” by K. Bernardo and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and the tradition of the American in Europe by D. Grant propose different Apaches to symbolic interpretations and themes, thus they underline a unique nature and outstanding style of Hemingway and his literary vision.
Bernardo concentrates on symbolic interpretations and visual images used to define the meaning of the short story. He underlines that what reader is not amazed at the end of “Hills Like White Elephants” to learn that thirty-five minutes have passed while Jig and her man wait for the train to Madrid, a detail that suggests long silences between sparse dialogue, and hints at the lack of connection between the two. The early versions of that story put Jig and the American man on the train for which they only wait in the finished version. In contrast to Bernardo, Grant concentrates on traditions and language usage. The author underlines that in the dialogue the reader has no indication of authorial privilege. Focusing on both Hemingway’s evolution as a writer and on the writing process itself, a number of seminal studies have emerged over the past decade that traces the transformation of jotted notes into finished art. At this point, however, we stand upon the threshold of discovery. The construction of a comprehensive view of Hemingway’s stylistic development, evolving aesthetic, and philosophy of composition not only presents new directions for study but will also establish the theoretical framework necessary for a fresh examination of the entire Hemingway canon, seeming oddities and all. Their function is to determine, again, whether the ruthless, aggressive component of man’s need to create form and/or take life is dominant by nature or conditioning, and (this time) whether or not a woman can discover in herself the capacity to experience such aggression, so as to participate in man’s endeavor rather than merely appreciate its necessity in another.
Bernardo gives attention to details while Grant proposes to readers a general overview of the text and its cultural meaning. Bernardo writes: “It is clear that Jig does not want to have an abortion – not from what she says, of course, but from the pressure, the man applies to talk her into it” (Bernardo n.d.). Bernardo underlines that the young girl is in practice torn apart by needs simultaneously to compete and nurture. And though she incorporates both drives in a nearly incredible symbiosis with Grant’s interpretations, not even their remarkable concord of interests holds them together. In a bold, final attempt to resolve creatively the impasse of differing primary concerns between the sexes, these speculative portrayals of sexual atavism push human nature beyond its limits.
In contrast to Bernardo, Grant proposes to readers a cultural analysis of the text and interprets its meaning in terms of social relations and interactions. Hemingway’s characters look to Europe for an escape from an American mode of time” (Grant 1998). The authors construe in the fragments as a whole a thrust toward closure based upon classical resignation, beyond reliance even upon Hemingway’s customary mysticism. This would be an advance. Bernardo and Grant underline that for the resolutions of his other mature works, profound as they are, sustain his muted romanticism by the reassurance of epiphany — by transcending those contradictions in the human breast that render all quests for concord in love “unfinding,” and the maker’s quest for intimations of order “unrealizable” in the end. It is to that “country” beyond the material realm that the major direct his now-detached gaze at the end.
The main similarity is that both essays interpret the state of the young girl as pregnancy, thus there is a clear explanation of this situation. “This textual suggestion that the abortion will be the demarcating event bound to form the dividing line between their past and future experience is what the man seeks to neutralize by depicting the operation as a natural process of healing and restoration” (Grant 1998). He is reconciled to the spare compensation of going through the motions of commitment in an apparently random world, simply because this is the “country” in which we have been placed and in which we must participate with the resolution if we are to demonstrate our full detachment from the dashed dreams of mortal life. Only thus can we prove the true situation to all that men and women hope to gain by embraces.
In sum, both academic essays pay attention to symbolic details and the unique theme of abortion thus they follow different approaches and interpretations of the text. The distinctions in expression are even more important, however than the conventions held in common. The words communicate a sense of inevitable and unendurable loss which is a much more powerful rendering of the damnation theme than anything in the short story. The two most conventional reactions to adversity registered by an understanding of isolation are wrath and despair. The strength of this tradition helped to perpetuate the formal, lyrical expression of sorrow. Within a dramatic context representing the providential order that governed all things and all mankind, there arose a dramaturgical method that staged evil as something comic, not only for reasons grounded in the philosophy of human relations but for the more practical homiletic purpose of engaging the least sophisticated of minds.
Works Cited
- Bernardo, K. Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”.
- Grant, D. Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and the tradition of the American in Europe. Studies in Short Fiction. 1998.
- Hemingway, E. Hills Like White Elephants.