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Ernest Hemingway, "Hills Like White Elephants"

BIOGRAPHY

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Hypertextual Annotations

There is an interpretive annotated hypertext of the story online posted for community college classes: a hypertext posted by Professor Eric Hibbison (Virginia Community Colleges Beach City College). Browse through the hypertext and consider the interpretive possibilities it suggests. Are there points which you would expand upon or disagree with? What would you emphasize if you were doing such annotations? What questions would you pose or annotations would you make in addition to the ones alongside the text?

Biographical and Historical Context: The Jazz Age and the "Lost Generation"

Ernest Hemingway was a major figure in the Jazz Age, living for a while in Europe and friendly with literary expatriates F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound, as well as numerous artists and musicians.  Traditional values in art and literature, as well as morality, were seriously challenged by the dislocations and disillusions of the First World War which created the so-called " lost generation." Hemingway was especially affected, having been wounded at nineteen while serving as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy during the war. These Web sites, as well as others listed on the Related Links page, are rich in resources for considering how Hemingway's world may have influenced the style and subjects of his writing, including "Hills Like White Elephants." Consider the story in light of some of the changing values and artistic innovations of the Jazz Age. How does this context help you understand some of the details and gaps in the story?

Literary Comparisons

As Professor Bryant Mangum relates, Hemingway said of his writing: "If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story." Read "A Clean Well-Lighted Place," "A Very Short Story," and/or "Indian Camp," all of which are definitely "iceberg stories" with many gaps for the reader to fill. Compare the kind of information which is hidden and speculate on how that adds to the stories. Another kind of comparison could be based on the concept of the "zero ending" in several stories, including Anton Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog" (LIT 182, LITS 173) and Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" (LIT 771, LITS 580).

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