1. “Hills Like White Elephants”
By Ernest Hemingway
English 11

2. “For Sale: Baby Shoes – Never Used
“For Sale: Baby Shoes – Never Used.” “Why did the chicken cross the road?” Hemingway: “To die. Alone. In the rain.”

3. Hemingway is well-known for using very short sentences (and sometimes sentence fragments) and forcing people to mentally “fill in the blanks” of his writing. He is also known for his themes relating to loneliness and isolation.

4. Fun fact about Ernest Hemingway: in his fifties, in the 1950’s, he told Senator Joseph McCarthy that McCarthy was a little sh*t, and that he (Hemingway) could knock him (McCarthy) flat on his a** on the best day of his (McCarthy’s) life.
Ernest Hemingway was a world traveler, fearless, bold adventurous, fiercely independent, an alcoholic; and though macho in every stereotypical way, also a deeply sensitive writer.
Hemingway treated the women in his life quite horribly, from what I understand. He was married four times, and was an avid hunter and killer.

5. However, the pain and suffering that human beings inflicted on each other was a matter that concerned him a great deal, and which surfaces time and again in his writing.
Hemingway suffered from mental illness, which ultimately led to his suicide. He shot himself in the head with a shotgun.

6. Iceberg Principle
First off, tell me the one most important fact that most people know about icebergs, which is particularly relevant if you are sailing near them or in areas where there are icebergs…

7. Iceberg Principle
Most of the iceberg, by definition, Is under water. This represents Hemingway’s Iceberg Principle, which guided most of what he wrote.

8. Iceberg Principle
In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway outlined his “theory of omission” or “Iceberg Principle”. He states: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

9. Iceberg Principle
This principle is also very much in effect in his story which we’ll look at today: “Hills Like White Elephants”. For all of Hemingway’s stories, most of what’s going on is underneath the surface, and you will have to really mentally struggle to find out what’s actually happening.

10. Vocab “Reale” [rey-ahl] = Spanish coin, currency
“Anis” is a type of plant that is important in making absinthe. Absinthe is a drink made from wormwood, which has a licorice-like taste and is high in alcoholic content. Hemingway drank a lot of absinthe.

11. White Elephants
Once there was a cruel and unjust king in an ancient kingdom in Asia. One of his subjects displeased him, so he sent to that subject a white elephant, as a “gift”. In that culture, a white elephant was sacred, and could not be slaughtered for meat or other uses, and could not be put to work (as other elephants might be) as a labor animal. The unlucky subject thus had to care for and feed the elephant, which lives on average as long as a human, and over the course of his life the expense of caring for and feeding the elephant (which has an enormous appetite) ruined him financially, leaving him destitute.

12. White Elephants
Dictionary definition: A possession that is useless or troublesome, especially one that is expensive to maintain or difficult to dispose of.
Keep this in mind as we read “Hills Like White Elephants”.