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Literature Essay Samples Close Readings & Essay Craft

Hills Like White Elephants: What the Dialogue Refuses to Say

Any serious Hills Like White Elephants essay has to begin with a formal fact: the story is almost entirely dialogue, and the most important subject in that dialogue is never named. Ernest Hemingway's 1927 story runs to fewer than fifteen hundred words and contains no internal monologue, no authorial commentary, and no resolution. What it contains is a couple sitting at a train station in Spain, drinking beer and anise, talking around a decision that will define the rest of their lives.

The couple is identified only as "the American" and "the girl" (later called Jig, once, by the American). They are waiting for a train to Madrid. Between them, unspoken but structurally central to every exchange, is the question of whether Jig will undergo what the American calls "the operation." Hemingway's iceberg theory, his stated principle that a writer who knows the material fully can omit facts and the reader will feel them anyway, operates here with maximum compression. Understanding what the story does requires tracking not just what the characters say but what the shape of their saying reveals.

The Landscape as Argument

The story's opening description divides the world in two. On one side of the train tracks, the hills are "brown and dry." On the other side, the land is described as having "fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro" with "mountains" beyond. The couple sits on the dry side, in the shade, looking out at the fertility they have not crossed toward.

Jig is the one who looks at the hills on the dry side and offers the story's central image: "They look like white elephants." A white elephant is proverbially a rare possession that costs more to maintain than it is worth, a gift that cannot easily be refused. Jig names the pregnancy without naming it, encoding her perception in a figure of speech the American immediately deflects. "I've never seen one," he says, and when she tells him he wouldn't have, the exchange closes. He does not pursue what she means. The simile is Jig's alone, and the American's refusal to engage with it is the first signal of the power imbalance the story will spend the rest of its pages examining.

The fertile valley beyond the tracks, visible but unreached, functions as the life the pregnancy represents. Jig looks at it twice. The second time, she says: "And we could have all this." The American's response is that they can have it, that nothing is stopping them, but his definition of "having it" requires her to undergo the operation first. The landscape does not change between her two looks at it; what changes is how fully she understands what she is being asked to give up.

The Operation and the Language of Coercion

The American never uses the word abortion. He says the operation is "awfully simple" and "not really an operation at all," that it is "just to let the air in." These phrases deserve close attention because they are doing persuasive work under the cover of reassurance. Calling something simple is a way of preempting objection. Saying it is "not really" the thing it plainly is, is a way of managing the other person's perception of the decision they are being pressured toward.

The American also deploys the first-person plural strategically. He says, "I think it's the best thing to do. But I don't want you to do it if you don't really want to." The sentence structure concedes her autonomy while the surrounding context removes it: every line before and after this one argues for the operation. When Jig responds, "And if I do it you'll be happy and things will be like they were and you'll love me," she is summarizing the logic of his position more accurately than he has stated it himself. He denies it, but the denial comes inside a conversation that has made her summary indistinguishable from the truth.

Jig eventually asks the American to please please please please stop talking. The repetition is not hysteria; it is the only escalation available to someone who has exhausted every other register. He has not listened to a single thing she has said about what she wants. The four-word repetition is a formal breakdown, the point at which ordinary syntax cannot carry the weight of what she is feeling.

Hills Like White Elephants Themes: Power, Voice, and the Limits of Dialogue

The central Hills Like White Elephants theme is the asymmetry between two people who nominally share a conversation but do not share equal power within it. The asymmetry shows in the language each character is permitted. The American makes declarative statements and offers analysis. Jig asks questions, offers images, and retreats into short answers when she is not heard. The one moment she takes full control of the conversation, the moment she says she will "scream," is also the moment the American leaves the table, physically removing himself from an exchange he can no longer steer.

A second theme is the relationship between naming and reality. The story is built on absences: the child is not named, the procedure is not named, the country the couple came from is not named, their history is given only in trace. Hemingway's method here connects to a broader craft principle: close reading as a method means attending to the specific texture of the prose, including its silences, rather than reaching for generalizations about what the story is "about." The silences in this story are load-bearing. For an extended discussion of how to build an argument from that kind of textual pressure, see the guide to close reading as a method, not a vibe.

A third theme, less often foregrounded, is mobility and its cost. The American and Jig are travelers. They have "looked at things and tried new drinks" across multiple countries. This freedom of movement is the American's definition of their relationship's value. For Jig, the pregnancy represents a different kind of future, rooted rather than transient. The train station setting makes this explicit: they are suspended between departure and arrival, between one life and another, and the story ends before the train comes.

Character: The American and Jig

The American is never given a name, which is both a realistic detail (Jig never uses it in dialogue) and a signal about his function. He represents a particular kind of early-twentieth-century masculine authority: well-traveled, articulate in the language of reasonableness, and entirely unable to hear a perspective that conflicts with his preferred outcome. He is not a villain in any schematic sense. He says "I love you" and means it in the way available to him. But love in his idiom is conditional on Jig remaining the person he wants her to be, unencumbered, ready to move on to the next train.

Jig is the more complex character and the more active intelligence in the story. The white elephant simile is hers. The observation that the hills look "lovely" from the shade is hers, immediately qualified by the recognition that "everything tastes of licorice," a line that reads as a comment on how her present life has come to feel repetitive and numbing. She is the one who looks at the distant valley and says, "And we could have all this," placing the future conditional against the American's present-tense insistence. Her final "fine" is the story's most complex word: it closes the conversation without resolving it, and Hemingway pitches it so that a reader cannot determine whether she has accepted, submitted, or simply stopped.

Writing a Hills Like White Elephants Essay: Where to Focus

The most productive essays on this story resist summarizing the plot and instead argue about a specific formal or thematic choice. Strong thesis options include the following directions:

Whichever direction an essay takes, the claim needs to be specific and contestable. For guidance on distinguishing a genuine argument from a description, the resource on building a thesis that is actually an argument works through that distinction with examples. The key move in a Hills Like White Elephants analysis is recognizing that the story's meaning lives in its form: in what the characters cannot say, in the landscapes they do and do not face, and in the verb tenses and sentence structures that reveal what each of them actually wants.

The Ending

The story ends with Jig's smile directed at "the other people" waiting at the station, then with the American returning from moving the bags and asking how she feels. She says: "I feel fine. There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine." The repetition mirrors the American's earlier rhetorical patterns, the reassurance-loop he uses to smooth over difficulty. Whether Jig has adopted his language as capitulation, or is deploying it as irony, or has genuinely detached from the conversation, the text does not decide. The train, which would force a decision by arriving, has not arrived. Hemingway ends the story at the last possible moment before resolution, which is the story's final and most precise formal choice.

Frequently Asked Questions

What do the hills like white elephants symbolize?

The hills, which Jig describes as looking "like white elephants," concentrate several ideas at once: the unborn child, something rare and burdensome, and a gift that cannot be refused without cost. The simile belongs to Jig alone, which signals that she is the one doing the real imaginative work in the story, while the American responds only with deflection.

What is the operation in Hills Like White Elephants?

Hemingway never names it. The American calls it "awfully simple" and says it is "just to let the air in," which is period-consistent language for an abortion. The refusal to name it is both a censorship strategy and a formal choice: the gap in language mirrors the gap in the relationship, where the most important thing cannot be spoken plainly.

Who wins the argument at the end of Hills Like White Elephants?

The ending refuses a winner. Jig says she feels "fine" and smiles at the other waiting passengers, but nothing has been decided aloud. Hemingway withholds resolution on purpose: the train has not yet arrived, and the couple's fundamental disagreement has not been voiced, let alone settled. The smile reads as performance rather than relief.

What is the iceberg theory and how does it apply to this story?

Hemingway's iceberg theory, also called the theory of omission, holds that a writer who knows enough can leave out significant material and the reader will still feel its presence. In Hills Like White Elephants, the pregnancy, the word abortion, any character history, and any internal thought are all below the surface. The story consists almost entirely of what the characters cannot bring themselves to say directly.

Sources

All textual quotations are drawn from Ernest Hemingway, "Hills Like White Elephants," first published in Men Without Women (1927), now in the public domain.