How to Understand Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants"

One of the most-taught and most-debated Hemingway short stories, "Hills Like White Elephants," is explicated for you in this article.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

1. Note the objective narration. Hemingway gives the reader even less than the usual third-person. Even "he said" and "she said" dialogue tags are often removed. This shifts the focus onto the dialogue itself, the words-as-words, not the people speaking them.
2. Determine the characters' attitudes. Again, this is achieved through focusing entirely on language, which is vague and defeatist: "awfully simple operation," "all so happy," "everything will be fine," "we could have everything," etc. These folks are sarcastic, exhausted and quietly desperate for opposing goals (he, for his wife to seek an abortion; she, for forgetting the whole business, whatever that might result in).
3. Use what little else Hemingway gives away. The setting is a river valley, usually associated with fertility, but the valley is "brown and dry." The central conflict determined in Step 2 is inherent even in these sorts of details, not to mention the story's title. Hemingway-as-painter is a common and helpful frame of mind. Jig's bag is full of travel stickers: escapism in travel is no rare find in our tribe. This also, in usual Hemingway fashion, casts shadows of blame on a woman and, by way of omission, a lack of nobility and courage (i.e. the flawed male tyro) on the man's part.
4. The Elephant in the Room. Hemingway's ambiguous irresolution betrays human weakness in its purest form. The act of decision, exercising one's will, is what makes one human. But once a decision is reached, that fact of the world becomes fixed, permanent, and therefore no longer human. Thus, by keeping the elephant in the room and not deciding about getting rid of it or living with it--by simply ignoring it--these characters are Hemingway's prototypes of the best in our tribe. "Just letting the air in" sounds like the act of breathing for a reason. Hemingway equates abortion with lung function--this is a thematic linchpin for the story and most of Hemingway's work.