the "lost generation."

First, Hemingway experiments with the limitation of language. Through the couples' strained dialogue, "Hills..." explores the painful inadequacy of communication.  The story's central tension creates a great place for Hemingway to develop and test his terse, limited, and concise prose style.  If you leave the story confused, then Hemingway has succeeds in pointing out that language itself is often broken, powerless, and frustrating.

Second, the story explores the dark side of the carefree, drunken, and exotic life of American expatriates in the 1920s -- a life that Hemingway lived and knew well.  Without resorting to the heavy-handed moralizing found in much of early-twentieth-century American literature,  Hemingway's story reminds his readers that the every good party is followed by a bad hangover.  In part, the story is great because it delivers a strong, old-fashioned, Victorian, moral warning in a style that is wonderfully indirect, intriguing, engaging, and modernist. In other words, Hemingway gets away with a bit of preaching about the cost of sexual freedom without ever sounding 'preachy'.

Third, Hemingway offers a feminist message.  Yes, Hemingway.  Yes, feminist.  By the end of the story, Hemingway succeeds in making the man, and to some extent men, seem cowardly, selfish, and detestable.  At the same time, the woman earns a degree of our pity when we realize what she must put up with.   However, the woman is not pitifully weak.  Her now-famous request that the man "please, please, please... stop talking" is a moment of empowerment in a story that otherwise offers only disempowered language.  Because the man is pushy, deceptive, and manipulative about the abortion; and because the woman sees the man's weakness and worthlessness; the story offers a warning to women.  The story suggests that women watch out for themselves, rely on themselves, and avoid the sexual traps that men set.  By making us feel just how horribly trapped the woman is, Hemingway asks women: would you want to be in her situation?  If not, watch out for manipulative men and rely on your own female judgement and decisions.

Ernest Hemingway's short story "Hills Like White Elephants" is an iceberg of a narrative; a story in which practically all the drama and tension is below the surface. The action is almost non-existent: A couple wait at a small railway station for the train to Madrid, order drinks and discuss whether the girl will have a "procedure" or not. That is all that happens. Beneath the surface, however, is all the guilt and trauma attached to abortion (illegal in most European countries at the time and particularly taboo in Catholic Spain) and the misery of a failed, unequal relationship. The story comes from a collection called Men Without Women, a bitterly appropriate title given the isolation of the two central characters.

There are a myriad of themes: the sterility and boredom of relationships in the modern world, the conflict of reason and emotion, the poverty of a life without values or attachment. The man in the story is perfectly reasonable, but Hemingway seems to be pointing how reason such as his is an unsatisfactory standard by which to live. A life which might seem enviable from the outside, that of a rich man without responsibilities, with nothing to do but see new sights and try new drinks, is in fact so hollow and meaningless that it is bound to degenerate into squalid, miserable scenes like this one.

The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.
‘And we could have all this,’ she said. ‘And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said we could have everything.’
‘We can have everything.’
‘No, we can’t.’
‘We can have the whole world.’
‘No, we can’t.’
‘We can go everywhere.’
‘No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.’
‘It’s ours.’
‘No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.’
‘But they haven’t taken it away.’
‘We’ll wait and see.’
‘Come on back in the shade,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t feel that way.’
‘I don’t feel any way,’ the girl said. ‘I just know things.’

Several important themes are choices and consequences; doubt and ambiguity; and men's perspective versus women's perspective. To my mind, however, the most important theme is honesty versus dishonesty.

The foremost instance of this theme is that the American man persists in saying that he only wants Jig to undergo the operation if she wants to yet, at the same time, he persists in claiming that it is a simple and perfectly natural procedure and that he is sure she wouldn't even mind, since it really is nothing. One of these sets of expressions of sentiment and opinion is dishonest. Either he is putting her wishes first or he is putting his wishes for what her feelings and experience will be first. Both can't be true at one and the same time.

'I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do -’
‘Nor that isn’t good for me,’ she said. ...
‘You’ve got to realize,’ he said, ‘that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.’

Another example is that he presumes to fathom what a woman's feelings and experience will be in a realm of life that is exclusively female. This too is dishonest. Honesty would require an admission of limited perspective and empathy. Honesty would require the courage to refrain from trying to shape Jig's sentiments and feelings. Honesty would require an unveiled, unambiguous expression of his wishes, which--by all evidence in the text--is that he wishes to not be the father of a living child.

'I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.’
‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along.’
‘Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want anyone else. ....'

Finally, the conversation excerpted above further expresses the man's dishonesty. Jig is expressing her perspective of the finality of the circumstance. On one hand, if she has the abortion, her world will be changed forever since an abortion is not an insignificant thing, either physically or spiritually. On the other hand, if she does not have an abortion, her world will be changed forever but in a very different direction: she will lose the frivolous and fun relationship she has with the man--as they travel and collect luggage labels and taste new drinks--and she will have his child to mother. Dishonesty is represented because the man won't admit to the change in dynamics the pregnancy brings into their relationship as a result of the change in dynamics it brings to Jig's life.