Hills Like White Elephants

“Hills Like White Elephants”

• Genre: Fiction; short story
• Originally Published: 1930
• Reading Level/Interest: College/adult
• Structure/Length: approx. 4 pages
• Protagonist and Central Conflict: A man known as “the American” and a woman named “Jig” sit outside a train station in Madrid. When Jig says the hills in the distance look like white elephants, it sets off bickering between the two about a “perfectly natural” procedure that he wants her to have. Jig is hesitant because once you take “everything” away, it can never come back.
• Potential Sensitivity Issues: Discussion of abortion

Ernest Hemingway, Author

• Bio: 1899-1961; part of the “Lost Generation” of modernist writers; American novelist, story-story writer, and journalist; raised in Oak Park, Illinois; reporter for The Kansas City Star for a few months after high school; was an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in World War I; seriously wounded in 1918 and sent home; had four wives; covered the Spanish Civil War as a journalist; was present as a journalist with Allied troops during the Normandy landings and liberation of Paris in World War II; lived in Key West, Florida, and in Cuba; survived two plane crashes in two successive days; died by suicide at his home in Idaho; awarded the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Old Man and the Sea and the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature
• Other Works: In Our Time (1925); The Sun Also Rises (1926); A Farewell to Arms (1929); To Have and Have Not (1937); For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940); The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

CENTRAL THEMES connected and noted throughout this Teaching Unit:

• Crossroads and Existential Crisis
• Differing Perspectives on Loss
• Detachment Versus Engagement

STUDY OBJECTIVES: In accomplishing the components of this Unit, students will:

• Gain an understanding of the social and historical context of the Lost Generation.
• Study paired texts and other brief resources to make connections via the text’s themes of Crossroads and Existential Crisis, Differing Perspectives on Loss, and Detachment Versus Engagement.
• Analyze and evaluate the characters and themes to draw conclusions in structured essay responses regarding the characters’ agency, the author’s prose style, and other topics.