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"Hills Like White Elephants"

). He became a reporter rather than going to college, thus going against his father's wishes, and he became fascinated by the war raging in Europe and proceeded to go there to see it for himself. All this was part of his attitude toward masculinity in men, something he prized highly, and something that would infuse his writing (Hardy and Cull 14-15).

"Hills Like White Elephants" is one of the fourteen short stories issued in 1927 in his second collection, Men Without Women. His first collection had been In Our Time, a collection with an unusual structure. Edmund Wilson notes that In Our Time was an odd but original book:

It had the appearance of a miscellany of stories and fragments, but actually the parts hung together and produced a definite effect. There were two distinct series of pieces which alternated with one another: one a set of brief and brutal sketches of police shootings, bullfight crises, hanging of criminals, and incidents of the war; and the other a set of stories dealing in its principal sequence with the growing-up of an American boy against a landscape of idyllic Michigan, but interspersed also with glimpses of American soldiers returning home (Wilson 17).

Wilson believes that the war was intended to be the key for the whole book, and the brutality of the war is contrasted with the more idyllic and peaceful scenes of the boy at home in the States. Later, however, the boy turns up as a soldier in the Italian army and is shot in the spine by machine-gun fire. Wilson finds that this indicates a more fundamental relationship between the stories in the two interlocked series in the book:

The shooting of Nick in the war does not really connect two different worlds: has he not found in the butchery abroad the same world that he knew back in Michigan? Was not life in the Michigan woods equally destructive and cruel? (Wilson 17).

The stories in Men Without Women, as with Hemingway's earlier stori...

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"Hills Like White Elephants". (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:05, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1700676.html