Hills Like White Elephants: An Analysis

Communication, especially effective communication is crucial to maintaining personal and business relationships. Some may consider it fundamental to maintaining success but poor communication may cause trouble. Ernest Hemingway was born in Cicero (Oak Park), Illinois in the early 20th century. Like many men in the era, he served in World War I. After the war, Hemingway moved to Paris and became a key part of “The Lost Generation”, a group of writers in the 1920s who wrote about the death of the American Dream and the lifestyles of the wealthy. During this time, Hemingway and his wife began touring the Festival of San Fermin in Spain, which influence his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Old Man and the Sea, and a Nobel Prize in Literature. Many of his books are considered to be classics in American literature. Hills Like White Elephants, initially published in August 1927 in the literary magazine, transition, and later in Men Without Women, a collection of short stories published in the same year is set in the valley of the Ebro in Spain. A man, an American and a woman, Jig is waiting for the train to Madrid at a train station. During this time, they talk about an implied operation as they drink beer and admire the scenery. The hills serve as a quaint background for a growing difference between the couple,

According to stylistician M.A.K. Halliday, Hills Like White Elephants is “motivated [by] frequently generated...repetition of words, clauses, and groups of related words or “lexical sets”” (Link), which proves to be true as “it is through this repetition that much of the argument is played out”. By repeating phrases and lexical sets, it sets a tone that the characters are non-moving. They will not get anywhere with the identical speech pattern since they repeat many words over, leaving themselves in a