Hills Like White Elephants and the Secret Life of Walter Mitty

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Opposing Viewpoints: Hills Like White Elephants and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Both short stories, Hills like White Elephants and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, were published twelve years apart, but each proves to have vast differences as well as comparable similarities. In Hills like White Elephants the author, Ernest Hemingway describes a very deep conversation between a man and a woman about their upcoming obstacles. While James Thurber, author of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, describes the many day dreams an ordinary man faces during his day out shopping. The reader can compare and contrast these two short stories by interpreting the relationships of the characters, the dialogue and how it was written, and the setting of where each story took place. While each of these short stories have very different themes, each of them contain a relationship that consists of a man and a woman. The man in Hills like White Elephants is believed to have impregnated the woman from the story, named Jig. Even though their relationship is not clear, Hemingway describes their relationship as romantic and physical, but not committed. On the other hand, in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the reader is aware of the relationship of the man and the woman because it is Walter and his wife. Thurber depicts the characters’ relationship to be mundane and seemingly repetitive. Furthermore, Walter Mitty uses his day dreams to escape his relationship with his wife, while the man in Hills like White Elephants would like to mend his relationship with Jig in order to assess the problem at hand. The techniques Ernest Hemingway and James Thurber used to write the conversation between these two relationships proves to be different from traditional dialogue. In Thurber’s piece, when a new character says something the line does not shift like it normally should. Instead, the whole
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