I think all authors can be considered reliable. They may sometimes use a narrator who is or is not reliable. But in "Hills Like White Elephants," Hemingway is not using a fictitious narrator; he is writing in what is called third-person omniscient. Whatever he says is reliable, although he may have left out a great deal of information, as he liked to do in his short stories. There is a big difference between a reliable author and a reliable narrator.
Ernest Hemingway , in “Hills Like White Elephants,” tells the story mainly through two devices, dialogue, and an impersonal narrative voice. Because the characters, in a sense, tell their own stories, one gets an almost impersonally journalistic sense of the narrator. Since the narration occupies only seven paragraphs and is primarily descriptive, one gets a sense that the narrator is “reliable” in a traditional sense. On the other hand, the...
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story isfiction, constructed by an author with some strong personal issues about male-female relationships, and the dialogue is not “real” reported dialogue, but rather an imagined conversation that the author manipulates to create certain audience responses, and thus not a reliable guide to how real relationships function.
In Hills Like White Elephants, are Hemingway's characters reliable?
The reliability of a character is based upon a few different things when looking at a character or a narrator. The things to examine, when trying to decide if a character/narrator is reliable, are dialogue, indirect characterization, direct characterization, and the character's private thoughts. On top of that, one must realize that some will not agree with an individual's interpretation of character reliability. Character reliability is simply too subjective.
In regard to Hemingway's short story Hills Like White Elephants, one needs to take into consideration a few things. First, the entire story contains mostly dialogue. Therefore, given that dialogue does not provide any true insight into a character's mind, one can easily conclude that the characters are not reliable. This is based upon the fact that no private thoughts for either of the characters are provided. (Private thoughts provide what a character is actually thinking about a conversation, another character, or what is going on around them.)
Outside of that, readers, over the course of the story, are left confused about the decision the characters make regarding the abortion. Readers are simply left hanging at the end of the story without closure.
One last thing that readers need to consider is the fact that the characters remain unnamed. One can assume that Hemingway chose not to name the characters (although the American refers to the girl as Jig, readers know that this is a nickname) in order to keep them anonymous. This being said, the fact that readers cannot associate a true name for each of the characters provides another justification regarding the unreliability of the characters.