Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway

In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” I noticed that there is a lot of repetition in the dialogue of the story, and the man and the women tend to repeat the same ideas with different phrasing. I thought that this kind of showed how the man and the woman weren’t agreeing on the situation of ‘the operation’ and they keep on skirting around how they actually feel through repeating themselves. I also noticed how the woman said in the beginning that the hills looked like white elephants, and then later on in the story she took it back and said that they didn’t anymore. I think that she did this because the man didn’t agree with her and she wanted to please him. This hints that perhaps the woman easily caves in to the man’s ideas, and perhaps she will do the same in the situation of ‘the operation’. The woman’s statement about the hills show a hint of her free thinking, but is quickly taken away. This could be a statement about women as a whole, and how in the time period of Hemingway and Chopin women were very easily coerced by men and had little independence.