What Hemingway Designed: Character in Hills Like White Elephants
Reading Hill’s Like White Elephants like a writer
Form, Not Formula: Lifting the Hood on Hemingway's Character Design
Characters Are What They Do
Characters aren’t who they say they are — they’re what they do. In life, people reveal themselves in the gap between their words and their actions. Fiction works the same way. You don’t design for what a character tells the world. You design for what they do when the pressure makes telling impossible.
Building from the Inside Out
Every character’s behavior under pressure is shaped by two drives: the external want and the internal need. The want is concrete and stageable — the thing they’re trying to achieve in the plot. The need is the hidden emotional lack or fear that fuels their deeper behavior. In the best designs, these drives are in direct tension.
In Hills Like White Elephants, the American’s want is for Jig to have the abortion so life can stay the same. His need — to stay in control and unbound — means he cannot give her what she truly wants. Jig’s want is clarity and connection. Her need — to be chosen as a partner whose life matters — will never fit inside his want.
Exotic Position and Opposition
Exotic position is the unusual role or social context that makes a character immediately interesting. Hemingway’s couple are likely wealthy expatriates, drifting through Europe without fixed responsibilities, living in a bubble of leisure. This is where opposition enters: the station is a pause they can’t avoid, a hinge between two futures — one fertile, one barren.
The geography reinforces this split: on one side of the valley, fields and trees run along the river; on the other, dry hills curve away under the sun. The bead curtain and the cool shade of the bar stand between them and the tracks, a thin barrier before the moment they must step out and board a train toward one life or the other. The setting mirrors their emotional landscape, making the physical space a map of the decision their nomadic life cannot absorb.
Characteristic Action
A characteristic action is the thing a character does the first time we see them that reveals who they are. We meet them mid-scene, drinks on the table, locked in a conversation circling the decision they refuse to name. He repeats the “operation” is simple — persuasion disguised as care — because he wants to convince her to choose his future over hers without ever saying it outright.
She tests him with questions and images to measure whether there is a version of their life in which she will be valued beyond her compliance. “We could have everything.” He echoes, “We can have everything.” She answers, “No, we can’t.”
That mirrored phrasing is doing double duty: it’s dialogue as action, forcing the conversation toward confrontation, and exposition as ammunition, slipping their conflicting definitions of “everything” into the subtext. The moment exposes the gap between them — he believes “everything” means maintaining their itinerant, commitment-free life, while she knows “everything” would require transformation he will not make.
Tags, Traits, and Exaggeration
Tags are verbal or imagistic markers the reader comes to associate with the character, and traits are the repeatable actions they perform under pressure. Together, they create verisimilitude — the consistency that lets a reader “see” a character even when the story offers minimal physical description.
In Hills Like White Elephants, the American’s tags — “perfectly simple,” “we’ll be fine” — and his traits — reframing her words, retreating into small talk about sunshine — mark him as someone who avoids direct confrontation while trying to control the narrative.
Jig’s tags — imagistic phrases like “white elephants” and “the bead curtain” — and her traits — toggling between play and precision, falling silent when promises ring false — reveal her as someone who processes through metaphor but sharpens to the truth when cornered.
Their respective Exaggeration heightens these single truths until they dominate every interaction. His calm, at first a soothing presence, becomes an unyielding wall she cannot break through. Her attention, gentle in its observation, narrows into a cutting instrument that strips his assurances down to their hollowness.
This sharpening under pressure is what allows Hemingway to compress entire arcs into a few hundred words, making the rupture and exposure at the end feel inevitable, earned, and final.
Designing A Character Arc
When all of these elements align, the arc closes itself. Jig’s “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” is rupture — the break from self-erasure (“I don’t care about me”) to the knowledge that nothing he offers is a future.
The American’s ending is exposure — unchanged, still reading from the same script, offering to carry the bags, claiming love even though nothing he says is true because nothing will ever be the same again.
Rupture and exposure are not tricks. They are the inevitable result of character design that forces the want and the need to grind against each other until one breaks and the other is revealed.
Call to Action
Want to design character arcs that land with the same inevitability and force as Hemingway’s? The Advanced Character Development Guide doesn’t tell you what to write — it trains you to build characters whose wants and needs collide under pressure, whose traits and tags create instant recognition, and whose actions reveal the truth no matter what they say. Use it to sharpen characters you’ve already written or to design new ones that can carry a story all the way to rupture, exposure, or both.
Read the story yourself: Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway