Combat and Classics is a series of podcasts and online seminars that explores the nature of man in conflict and cooperation through socratic dialogue and the great books. For more info visit 
How do human beings confront a crisis? Anne Kniggendorf and Matt Young join Brian for a conversation about Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants.”
In case you missed them: Tune in to Brian’s interviews with Anne and Matt in previous episodes.
Get more C&C on the PEL site or at combatandclassics.org.
Do relationships have a single, dramatic moment of crisis? No, they go sideways between trains in the boredom and repetitions and pettiness of those who have spent too much time together. He tells her that she doesn’t have to if she doesn’t want to over and over. How often is an attempt to persuade masked by a pretense of deference? The ‘operation’ is that moment in the game where both parties show their cards. He wants her to. What does his insistence on not being insistent say about how he feels about her? What does this relationship amount to? I think she knows. ‘ …. the shadow of a cloud moved across the fields of grain …’ Their moment has passed. She sees white elephants; he doesn’t – and she thinks he isn’t the kind to see them. This is such a sad story and I could feel it in what took hold in your conversation. Thanks Brian, Anne and Matt, I guess, for taking me there.
Very thoughtful comments Richard and glad you liked the pod!
What a great short story. I think the train station setting is so brilliant because they are at a crossroads in their relationship and in their lives. Reminds me of Before Sunset with Ethan Hawke. When she says you wouldn’t have seen a white elephant, I think the significance of that is that, up until this point, she has likely been agreeable and easy to keep around. A white elephant is something that is kind of hard to keep. It seems as though she is saying that he’s never been the kind of guy to take anything on that wasn’t easy. She has never been difficult. Maybe she’s always made herself easy to have around. I don’t think she knows the right decision to make but at the very least she realizes that things can never go back to the way they were before. Later on in the dialogue, you can see her sort of childishness come out. She wants to please this person. She wants to go back to her sort of juvenile naivete. “If I do that you won’t ever worry?” It’s the kind of simple and silly question that a child asks whereas an adult should know, she would know, that worry will happen. This series of dialogue gives you the sense that she is trying to put the genie back into the bottle. Innocence – or maybe not innocence, but the passage from child to adult, has been lost for her in a way and she’s hoping she can go back to being the carefree youth with no worries that she was. When she says “I don’t care about me.”, it seems to me that she realizes that she has had this internal shift and believes that maybe he hasn’t and COULD simply move on, and if she can just bury her own feelings then she can be ok. I got this sense that she resented him a little bit because he was able to stay in this sort of aloof and blissfully ignorant state which an operation could perpetuate but no matter what, for her, life has changed. “Once they take it away you can never get it back…” feels like a loss of innocence for me. And again, maybe not the right terminology but it’s that thing when you become an adult and you see your actions and life in a way that you didn’t in your youth. It’s the moment you take full responsibility for your choices maybe. When it says everyone was waiting reasonably for the train, it’s like – they are all allowing the things in life to happen and to move forward as adulthood presses on and life happens but he isn’t. He’s stuck in this sort of peter pan mode and wants to stop this event from happening. I felt a tension through this whole story between her realization about life and things happening and changing and the complete denial he seems to be in. In some ways, I think she is envious of him. I think the comment about waiting reasonably for the train being said by the narrator but while he is away from her suggests that he is not as much in denial about what is happening as the rest of the story makes it seem like. Anyway – it was a fun read and as with all stories, I wonder – how can one know what is legitimate interpretation and what is a total projection of my own internal stuff onto the story. I’d really like to talk to Hemingway. 🙂 Thanks for a fun podcast.
Whoa, super thoughtful Jennifer, thx!
Jennifer, such a terrific comment. Thank you. I DO wonder what Hemingway was thinking when he wrote this. It gives you pause when he is so often accused of being a male chauvinist. He inhabits ‘the girl’ here with such empathy and sensitivity.
Wow – I am surprised by that. I kept wondering how a man could have written this because I have my own misconceived ideas that only women can have certain feelings that seem so closely tied to being a woman. A famous ancient Roman said – “I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me.” Hemingway’s writing makes me realize that the way we separate men and women furthers this idea of otherness. We are all human and, although a man may never understand physical pregnancy, he certainly can understand what it means to be changed by a pregnancy. Perhaps the joke is all on us; he may, in fact, identify the most with the feelings of the female character in the novel! I certainly read this as more insightful to the inner world of the female character whereas the inner feelings of the male character are more ambiguous.