Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway

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Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway

“Which line of criticism best suits this short story?

Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ is suited to a

Psychoanalytic perspective criticism and is the most effective, as it

contains hidden, deeper meanings which the author had represented in

this piece, by explicating the text to explore the themes of choices,

plot, setting and imagery, and essentially abortion.

Psychoanalytic criticism expresses the secret unconscious desires and

anxieties of the author. This particular thought of criticism is

associated with looking for evidence of psychological conflicts,

guilts, ambivalences, which undoubtedly is overflowing in this

particular piece. The couple in this short-story have to deal with the

conflict of ambivalence, for it is anti-climatic in terms that

throughout the piece, there is conflict of ambivalence, the undecided

minds of these two people of whether or not to abort their unborn

child. Firstly, the whole first paragraph alone immediately is filled

with themes to the consciousness mind of the reader. ‘The hills

across…were long and white’ establishes an abortion theme and plot,

and is not just hills that are long and white’; hills are shaped like

bumps which suggests the image of a womb. The title of the story

‘Hill’s like White Elephants’ makes its stand on the theme of abortion

– as a white elephant is associated with something helpless and

useless – like a foetus inside a mother’s womb. Therefore, the title

already established to the reader (before reading the text) that there

is a complex meaning to this story, thanks to a psychoanalytic

viewpoint. The fact...

... middle of paper ...

... quickly butter her up to make a quick decision, especially before the

train arrives, before they press ahead to the next step of their

journey through life.

It is apparent that Psychoanalytic criticism is, nonetheless, the best

method of criticism for this particular piece. Although Hemingway was

commonly known as a New Critic author, one cannot understand the piece

by reading it literally (as a new critic would methodise) without

fully understanding and retrieving the hidden meaning of what he

really wanted us to tell us in the text. Sharp use of imagery acting

as background effects to the plot and theme of abortion weaved into a

setting of crossroads of life (different directions of journey through

life) help bring the fuller meaning of the story and the author’s

intention, which is finally sought by the reader.

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