Hills Like White Elephants

Hills Like White Elephants is a short story by the American writer Ernest Hemingway, first published in 1927 in his collection Men Without Women. Set almost entirely as a single scene of dialogue at a small train station in the Ebro river valley in Spain, where an American man and a young woman he calls Jig sit drinking beer and anise liqueur while waiting for a train to Madrid, the story follows their tense, circling conversation about an unnamed operation the man keeps urging her to have, one he insists is simple and perfectly natural, while Jig grows increasingly withdrawn and ambivalent, comparing the surrounding hills at one point to white elephants. Although the word abortion never appears in the text, the couple's evasive, repetitive dialogue and the story's few spare descriptive details make clear to most readers what the operation is and the strain it is placing on their relationship, with Jig's closing insistence that she feels fine leaving her true feelings, and the couple's future, deliberately unresolved. Frequently cited as the clearest demonstration of Hemingway's iceberg theory of omission, in which the deeper meaning of a story is left almost entirely beneath the surface of its spare, unadorned dialogue and description, the story is among the most widely studied and anthologized of Hemingway's shorter works.