What Hemingway Designed: Dialogue in “Hills Like White Elephants”
Reading Hill’s Like White Elephants like a writer
Form, Not Formula: Lifting the Hood on Hemingway's Dialogue
Most of us are handed Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants in high school and asked what it's "about." Abortion. A couple's quiet crisis. A train station and two beers. But that summary misses the story—not the plot of what happens, but the story of how it's built. If you want to understand dialogue as a purposefully designed tool for narrative tension, you don’t read Hemingway as a reader. You read him as a mechanic. You lift the hood and take the engine apart.
What you find isn’t a formula, but form. Hemingway's dialogue doesn’t try to impress. It doesn’t announce theme or beg for sympathy. It does the thing it was designed to do. That thing is tension: tension that builds in silence, in rhythm, in contradiction. Tension that doesn’t break the story—it powers it. What we call minimalism is actually compression—language engineered at the sentence level to do triple-duty: move character, suggest plot, and reveal interiority without revealing anything at all.
Dialogue Is Action
Let’s be clear: Hemingway is not writing conversation. He’s designing conflict. Dialogue in this story is a tension system: characters want things, and they want them from each other. Every line spoken is an attempt. Every response is either resistance or retreat. There’s no idle talk, no character exposition, no theatrical reveal. Just two people trying to win a scene neither can.
"It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig," the man said. "It’s not really an operation at all."
He’s not describing the procedure. He’s trying to manipulate her perception. The repetition of “really” is not redundancy—it’s insistence. The word “operation” is named, then erased, in the same breath. That’s a tactical move. Words as camouflage.
Her silence isn’t passivity. It’s her move. This is dramatized dialogue doing what only dialogue can do: creating the scene by compressing power struggle into syntax.
Subtext Is Structure
This story is often praised for subtext, but subtext here isn’t ornamental. It is the structure. The conflict is unstated not because Hemingway is coy, but because the characters can’t afford to say what they mean. The minute they name it, the illusion that they’re still negotiating breaks. And negotiation—language—is the only tool they have left.
"They look like white elephants," she said.
This is metaphor not as poetry but as shield. She’s talking about the pregnancy, about regret, about the life she may or may not want. She’s testing whether it’s even safe to bring it up. He shuts it down:
“I’ve never seen one.”
That’s not banter. That’s rejection. He’s telling her: stop framing this emotionally. Stay in the box I’ve built. Literal. Logical. Minimal. The story lives in her failure to obey that rule.
The Said, the Unsaid, the Unsayable
You don’t understand Hemingway’s dialogue until you understand what it refuses. The said is what we get. The unsaid is what they won’t say to each other. The unsayable is what they won’t admit to themselves.
"Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?"
This isn’t just a plea. It’s a break in the system. The unsaid leaks. Repetition becomes rhythm becomes panic. Subtext, long contained, erupts. That’s a monologue in disguise. She’s not asking. She’s revealing.
And still—she doesn’t name it. Because she can’t. Because she doesn’t know if she has the right to.
Exposition as Ammunition
"That's all we do, isn't it—look at things and try new drinks?"
Here’s everything you need to know about their relationship: it’s performative, escapist, and hollow. But she doesn’t state those facts. She uses implication. This line is a backstory grenade tossed across the table.
She indicts him. She accuses him of wasting her life. And she does it without ever raising her voice. That’s what McKee meant by exposition-as-ammunition. Not information as background. Information as weapon.
What Hemingway Leaves Off the Page
This story has no internal monologue, no stage direction, no resolution. We know the characters only by what they say and how they avoid saying it. And yet—we know everything.
This is the craft goal. Every decision you make in dialogue must do something: escalate the conflict, unmask a desire, corner a character into a decision they can't take back.
Want to write like Hemingway? Don’t write like Hemingway. Write dialogue that works like architecture: tension across load-bearing lines.
Read the story yourself: Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway
