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Hills Like White Elephants Title Analysis

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Does someone continue to tiptoe around the unspeakable subject or come out and say it? An American man and a young woman, Jig, are at a crossroads in their lives. Like most people, they tiptoe around the difficult decision that they have to make. The decision that will change both of their lives forever. Because Ernest Hemingway left many things unsaid in the short story “Hills Like White Elephants,” the reader has to look at the symbolism in the fiction to fully understand what is going on. Ernest Hemingway uses the hills in his short story to symbolize Jig’s pregnancy and to symbolize the strain in Jig and the American man’s relationship. The first reading of the title makes one assume the quite literal reference, that the comparison may merely be between the color and the rounded contour of the hills that compose part of the setting. This assumption is supplemented by the first sentence, the subject of which is the “long and white” hills (Hemingway 122). When the hills are compared to the countryside, which is brown and dry, it suggests the strain that is put on Jig and the American man’s …show more content…

Towards the middle of the story, the symbolic essence of the title and the reason for the recurring mention of the hills become apparent. The reader may experience a flood of emotion after the dialog makes clear that the girl wants the baby, not the abortion, while the American man wants her to go through with the abortion. Jig wants to experience the joy of being a mother while the brown, dry countryside describes her life on the road. It is apparent that Jig will do anything to make the American man happy in her plaintive appeal that, “it would be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?”(Hemingway 125). In the process of making the man happy, she will be losing her own

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