Hemingway’s writing style in “Hills Like White Elephants” is minimalist and unadorned. It’s likely that his sparse style emerged from his years as a journalist combined with modernist literature’s commitment to ambiguity. “Hills Like White Elephants” essentially contains two different stylistic components: simple, cryptic dialogue and short interludes describing the surrounding scenery. Both of these elements are present in the following passage, in which the girl starts to consider the man’s proposal that she should have an abortion:
The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.
“And we could have all this,” she said. “And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.”
“What did you say?”
“I said we could have everything.”
“We can have everything.”
“No, we can’t.”
The first part of this passage is one of the rare moments in the story in which Hemingway moves his focus away from the couple arguing at their table and looks to the scenery. Here, his language becomes more descriptive, helping readers picture the “fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro,” as well as the mountains and the “shadow of a cloud” moving across the fields.
After this, Hemingway moves into an extended period of uninterrupted, tense dialogue between the man and the girl. Because he doesn’t include descriptions of the tone of voice, facial expressions, or body movements of either character, it’s hard for readers to know exactly what is happening in this scene. That the girl says “we could have everything” and then changes her mind to “no, we can’t” indicates that something has shifted inside her mind, but Hemingway’s minimalist style makes it impossible to know what. This is his way of forcing readers to come to their own conclusions about the scene (and the story as a whole).
