Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway
Published 1927 · 1,650 words · Short Fiction, Literary Fiction, Modernist & Experimental Fiction
How hard is Hills Like White Elephants to read?
Hills Like White Elephants scores 51 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 14 out of 100
- Hemingway uses short, plain words: beer, curtain, station, hills, Anis del Toro. The few Spanish touches are easily grasped, putting it near the simplicity of the Diary of a Young Girl rather than Gatsby's polish.
- Sentence structure: 15 out of 100
- Sentences are brief and paratactic, built from repeated phrases and clipped dialogue. Almost no subordination appears, making it simpler than the declarative prose of 1984.
- Abstraction: 38 out of 100
- The scene is entirely concrete: a table, drinks, a station platform. The abstract questions of choice and relationship sit beneath the talk, so it reads more concretely than The Remains of the Day but carries a subtext.
- Information density: 38 out of 100
- The story is under 2,000 words and gives little explicit information, yet every exchange carries implication. Compression is high but the surface is light, comparable to Gatsby in compactness.
- Narrative indirection: 84 out of 100
- The central event is never named, and the narrator never enters either mind. The reader must infer the pregnancy, the operation and the couple's rift from repetitive dialogue, more than in Gatsby and close to Pedro Paramo's reliance on inference.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- White elephants, the dry hills against the fertile valley, and the bead curtain carry the meaning, though there are few of them. It is lighter than Gatsby's green light and valley of ashes in number but similarly pointed.
- Ironic distance: 70 out of 100
- The man's reassurances ('it's really an awfully simple operation') say the opposite of what he means, and Jig's final 'I feel fine' contradicts everything before it. The irony is quiet and constant, in the register of Gatsby's double sympathy.
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- The story ends with no decision stated, only Jig's 'I feel fine' and the man's carrying of the bags. Readers are left with the situation unresolved, more open than Gatsby's closed plot.
- Structural complexity: 15 out of 100
- One scene, one location and a single span of about forty minutes, told in near-continuous dialogue. The structure is simple and linear, like the straightforward arrangement of Beach Read, though more compressed.
How Hills Like White Elephants is regarded
Hills Like White Elephants holds a literary regard score of 86 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.
Prizes
- Nobel Prize in Literature 1954, awarded to Ernest Hemingway