Hills Like White Elephants Literary Analysis

When a reader reads a short story they need to pay attention because even the smallest of details are important. This proves to be true due to analysis of the surroundings of the characters and how they react to them. In Ernest Hemingway's short story "Hills Like White Elephants," the main conflict is a man who is trying to convince his female companion to have an abortion but the girl is resistant to the whole idea. Between the description of the couple's surroundings, their dialogue, and how they react to the setting, Hemingway manages to clearly depict the complexity of the situation and the two different points of view of the couple who are the main focus in the story.
It is important to understand how the scenery could be used to portray a split in ideas. In
The distinction of the two sides in the setting helps to prove the different points of view of the couple by showing in who takes notice of the sides, and who does not. For example, the girl mentions the side where the hills "'look like white elephants'" (Hemingway 130) and she takes notice of the "fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro" (Hemingway 132). The girl is the one who is noticing the more optimistic images in the setting and that suggests she has a more positive approach to the future than the American who has not taken notice of these images. This further pushes the idea of the couple having two different points of view on their current situation. Stanley Renner elaborates on the girl's focus of the more beautiful images in this article titled "Moving to the girl's side of 'Hills Like White Elephants'" by stating that because the girl has chosen to pay attention to a side that has more fertile images and that she is focusing more strongly on what she wants and is also in that moment physically and mentally moving away from what the American wants her to do which is to get