Thursday, November 14, 2013

From what point of view is "Hills Like White Elephants" told?

In "Hills Like White Elephants," Hemingway makes masterful use of the objective point of view. In so doing, he brings the reader deeper into the conversation of the main characters because the reader must try to understand the content and emotional import of the conversation without any aid from the narrator. 


The objective point of view is a variety of third-person narration in which the narrator's function is to relate events that occur in the story from a context external to the thoughts and feelings of the characters in the story. This type of third-person narrator may also be referred to as a camera-on-the-wall or fly-on-the-wall narrator, as the point of view is of a non-sentient thing or device that merely captures the events of the story.


Hemingway uses this type of narrator in “Hills Like White Elephants” to force the reader to pay attention to the conversation itself, not the people having it. To enhance the effect he wants to achieve, he also limits his descriptions of the setting and the main characters. We know almost nothing about how they look or act, and even the expressions they may have while talking are a mystery to us. All the reader can do is try to understand what the characters are saying and then extrapolate what they are feeling from what they say and do not say. Thus, the reader in essence becomes an eavesdropper on the conversation—a third person to that conversation in terms of conversational roles—who must use his or her own experiences and understanding of the world to make sense of the meaning of the overheard conversation.

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