Hills Like White Elephants Rhetorical Analysis

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In Ernest Hemingway’s narrative “Hills Like White Elephants”, the topic being indirectly discussed between the American man and Jig is abortion. Put yourself in their era! Although his writing might seem archaic, try to interpret the story from beyond the surface. The American man calls the procedure “awfully simple” and all that had to be done was “let some air in.” This subtle description represents one of history’s varying ways of ending a pregnancy by introducing air into the uterus. He implies the pregnancy is “the only thing that bothers us. It's the only thing that's made us unhappy,” but the unraveling of their relationship seems to go deeper than that. Hemingway’s writing has explicit and subtle symbols to be delved into, the characters and their actions, their imagination, as well as their location in the train station. If you …show more content…
Named the “American man”, his tone is antagonistic with a hint of hypocrisy and his forte is manipulation. The girl wasn’t named till half way into the story, but she is “Jig”, meaning childish or trickery. Hemingway’s depiction of her isn’t of a woman, wife, or American even though she is a mother to be. The characters hide their feelings well, he uses his bravado and “man knows best” to influence her while she uses irony and sarcasm to make her points. The man has no regards for her feelings, he just wants to keep his freedom. What insensitive man says —“perfectly simple…just to let the air in” — to describe an operation like an abortion. They are heavy drinkers, in less than 40 minutes both of them drink a considerable amount of beer and liquor to hide the pain of an abortion. The Anis del Toro/ Bull’s Anisette is their liqueur of choice, its taste is bittersweet just like parenthood. Anis is a seed like that of a man’s unborn child, and the taste of it shows how a baby brings sweetness and pungencies to a couple’s

Hills Like White Elephants Rhetorical Analysis

Hills Like White Elephants In the story “Hills Like White Elephants,” Ernest Hemingway uses minimalistic dialogue, mood, and the motif of a ‘taboo’ procedure to portray a young woman confronting her future. The story uses these techniques to try and pass the intended message to the audience. Hemingway uses minimalistic dialogue between Jig and “the American” to portray a woman who is attempting to figure out her future. The story also uses mood to describe the seriousness of the issue that the two…

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that rely heavily on dialogue interspersed with clipped narrative reports offering little evaluation or interpretation. This style is prominent in some of his best-known stories, such as “The Killers,” “A Clean, WellLighted Place,” and “Hills Like White Elephants.”1 How surprising, then, that “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” has joined these others as one of his most anthologized stories, appearing, for example, in The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Longer, divided into several distinct sections…

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