Hills Like White Elephant Rhetorical Analysis

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Most stories pull the reader in with their fancy words and descriptive scenes, but Hemingway doesn’t use descriptive words. When you first read “Hills Like White Elephants” it’s seem like an ordinary conversation, but after reading it again you realize that the story is hidden in the dialog. In “Hills Like White Elephants” Hemingway brings the reader in by using dialog to reveal the inferences in the story, the emotions that Jig and the American feel, he also leaves the reader to make their own judgments about the characters. “‘They look like white elephants,’ she said,” Hemingway implies that there’s an elephant in the room, or at least there’s an elephant sitting between the American man and the girl called Jig (9, Hemingway). This elephant…show more content…
Hemingway shows the reader almost instantly that he is a man, at least in the sense of his knowledge and sense of control. The man doesn’t seem to care about Jig or the unborn child but instead he seems to care about what happens to himself. “I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know how I get when I worry,” as if to make her understand his actions through a simple guilt of him worrying (59, Hemingway). He gives no comfort to Jig, no actions are done to help her through what she’s going through. Hemingway writes a great story in dialog, leaving it up to the reader to make inferences based on the facts given so that they can figure out the story and the characters. The reader infers that Jig and the American’s relationship has come to an end and that Jig and the American don’t want the same things in life. The reader also infers that Jig may at first appear helpless but later she reveals that she’s ready to make her own decision. We can also see that the American sees himself as the responsible one of the two and that he later realizes that they aren’t going to stay

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