Nea's Short Fiction Response

     A subtle yet necessary aid in reinforcing the characters' qualities in Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" in is the selection of their 'names'. It is in their names that theme is reinforced cueing you into their personalities and how they are to be perceived. It is yet another way that a story with so little direct information assists you in understanding who the characters are and why they behave as they do.       In this story we are introduced to three characters, The American, the girl (who we later learn as 'Jig") and the woman set against the backdrop somewhere in Spain. There are immediate assumptions that can be inferred solely by the title given to the man in story, 'the American'. The first and most obvious - foreign, adventitious. This is supported by his attitude toward to the abortion, how Jig is processing the ordeal and his inability to understand and communicate beyond his own lens of the world. Throughout the...

 I found two interesting parallels within the text that reinforce the theme. The first being the window and the second being Louise's death.  The window served as the door to her freedom. Looking out of it, seeing the beginnings of spring, the blue sky and clouds, proposed a new beginning for Louise. It was then that she knew something was coming to her, a thing she did not immediately know, yet when fully realized, it was her freedom. The window represents the escape from the world she knew; the room, her home, a place of binding - to her husband and perhaps even her illness, into a place of newness, hope and possibility. The window acted as the catalyst and vehicle to finding hope through despair - in death and in a marriage that was consider death for many women during that time. Louise found her personal silver lining through that window - figuratively and literally ("the delicious breath of rain..." and "patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clo...