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From “Hills Like White Elephants”, Ernest Hemingway (1927)
Stylistic analysis: the passage perfectly illustrates the famous Hemingway’s style – economical and terse. It is characterized by short, simple sentences and active verbs; by an informal, commonplace vocabulary of short, denotative words; the absence of unnecessary adjectives and adverbs; and by a concentration on particular concrete images that record the surface level of experience. Descriptive details of setting are sparse though important – in this case they juxtapose the sensuous fertility across the river with the hot sterile foreground where the conversation between the two characters takes place. Such details, however, are clearly subordinate to the dialogue, which carries the narrative movement of the story and explores and illuminates the attitudes and temperaments of the character-participants. The objective point of view places the burden of interpretation on the reader, who must pay close attention to what is being said in order to identify correctly the verbal nuances and overtones that define both character and conflict.
The dialogue itself is difficult to follow. It is random, indirect, and inexplicit, for Hemingway’s characters, aware as they are that to expose oneself openly is to risk psychic injury, tend to approach each other obliquely, their real thoughts and emotions hidden and held tightly in check. In this passage, the girl senses, though she cannot or will not articulate the fact, that it is not the matter of her pregnancy – or the ”awfully simple operation” he proposes – that jeopardizes their relationship, but rather his failure to understand that human relationships themselves inevitably curtail and limit one’s freedom. Her inability to communicate this message and his failure to understand it – the failure of dialogue, if you will – thus serves to underscore and explain both the differences in their attitudes and personalities and the size of the barrier existing between them.
Tone
All of us are familiar with the term tone as it is used to characterize the special qualities of accent, inflection, and duration of a speaker’s voice. From an early childhood on we learn to identify and respond to these elements of speech. For example, a mother can tell her child to “Come here!” in a manner that is angry, threatening, concerned, amused, sympathetic, or affectionate, simply by altering her tone of voice. In each case, the mother’s meaning is the same – she wants her child to come. However, the relationship she creates with her auditor (the child) will differ dramatically according to her tone. Tone, then, is a means of creating a relationship or conveying an attitude. The particular qualities of a speaking voice are unavailable to a writer in creating tone, but to a certain extent rhythm and punctuation can substitute for a speaker’s accent and inflection, while the word order and word choice can influence tone as easily in prose as in speech. Just as the tone of the mother’s voice communicates her attitude of anger or concern, so tone in fiction is frequently a guide to an author’s attitude toward the subject or audience. For example, one recognizes at once the friendly, informal, and folksy tone of Huck Finn’s introduction to his adventures:
You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’, but that ain’t no matter.
Huck wants to make us his friends, so he writes just as he would speak, without striving for grammatical perfection. As soon as he realizes that we might be put off by the sense of self-importance in his allusion to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, he reassures us that it “ain’t no matter” if we have failed to read the book. The tone and content of the sentences combine to indicate that Huck wants us to like him and that he wants to like us. In contrast, in Mark Twain’s preface to Huckleberry Finn his tone is threatening at the same time that is ironic and humorous:
NOTICE
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
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