by Kerry Michael Wood

Created on: February 21, 2008   Last Updated: January 15, 2011

Ernest Hemingway's short story "Hills Like White Elephants" demonstrates his genius at integrating dialogue, setting, and symbolism with brevity and economy. This literary gem stands out among the handful of this author's stories that remain influential to present-day  writers.

Sometime in the late 1920s a young American couple are waiting in a railway station for the train from Barcelona that will take them to Madrid. They order beer to pass the 40-minute wait for the train, then switch to anisette with water. We hear tension in their conversation. The woman comments that the drink tastes like licorice.

"'Yes,' said the girl. 'Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you've waited so long for, like absinthe.'

'Oh, cut it out.'

'You started it,' the girl said. 'I was being amused. I was having a fine time.'

'Well, let's try and have a fine time.'"

The hot weather, the relief sought in beer and cold alcoholic drinks mirror a disagreement between the two people, the nature of which gradually becomes clear although without explicit statement. They are a couple, but there is distance and failure of communication between them, like the railroad tracks that are parallel and will never make contact.

The man finally addresses the subject of their disagreement, consciously skirting use of negatively charged language.

"'It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig,' the man said. 'It's not really an operation at all.'"

The woman is pregnant by the man, who wants her to get an abortion. The options are symbolized by the landscape. In one direction is sterility and barrenness: "The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. . . . in the sun and the country was brown and dry." In the other, fruitfulness and fertility: "Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees." The white hills, the woman says,are "like white elephants."

As their conversation continues, we interpret "white elephants" in ways that the woman, making her offhand remark, did not consciously intend. To the man, the developing infant is a white elephant - a gift that is valuable but unwanted, costly to maintain, and a problem he does not want to handle - a thing to be gotten rid of.

Will the woman become elephantine with engorged breasts and swollen abdomen if she refuses to terminate the pregnancy? Is the author aware of the white elephant in Buddhism and its connection to purity and knowledge? On the night before the birth of Buddha, his mother's womb was entered

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