The limitations of this narrator interested me from the start. Nothing but the setting was revealed, and there are almost no descriptions of the characters beyond “the man” and “the girl”. We only have pages made up of mostly spoken words and short actions to view. The reader must interpret who they are and why they behave the way they behave through analyzing the dialogue exchanged back and forth, with brief visual descriptions of their surroundings between that all seem to serve a purpose. This is especially true with the opening of the story.
At first glance, I honestly did not pay too much attention to the opening due to its factual nature. I took the information in and tried to recreate the setting visually with my imagination and dive into the story for the few solid minutes it took to read it. After I got more into the story, which is one I have never read prior, it only took me a few lines to feel the need to go back to the beginning and rethink what I was seeing and experiencing. There is a lot of information in the simple things, which turn out not to be so simple. The depiction of the setting intricately serves to set up the tension of the piece. There may not be vivid descriptions of the characters and their every action, but the vivid descriptions of their surroundings were everything when it came to relating it back to their conversation, the meat of the story.
The work opens like this:
The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid.
‘What should we drink?’ the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.
‘It’s pretty hot,’ the man said.
‘Let’s drink beer.’
‘Dos cervezas,’ the man said into the curtain.
‘Big ones?’ a woman asked from the doorway.
‘Yes. Two big ones.’
The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glass on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.
‘They look like white elephants,’ she said.
‘I’ve never seen one,’ the man drank his beer.
‘No, you wouldn’t have.’
‘I might have,’ the man said. ‘Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.’
The is a tension set up by Hemingway right off the bat, with more emphasis on the surroundings that the actual characters themselves in the start. In my opinion, that makes the beginning of this story intriguing and smart, and it made me want to keep reading. It is not simple, or a giveaway. It must be read into and interpreted. The setting of a train station, and the following dialogue between the man and the girl, gives across this feeling of being in the middle of something; it feels like a midpoint that a decision must be made at. The location here isn’t a final destination. It is a pit stop of sorts. There is this sense of choice about where to go and no sense of home or comfort and stability. It serves to setup up the idea of indecision between the couple about going through with the planned abortion. They seem to be at a crossroads, and there are a lot of untold stories hidden in their dialogue that makes this piece so interesting to me. We are seeing only a few minutes of the life of a couple that has quite a bit to decide and settle on, and we are left without a conclusion or deep insight as to what they are actually thinking. It can only be deciphered, and I think that feeling of confusion mixed with a heavy dose of intrigue is a beneficial feeling for a reader to experience.
This is a study guide for the story, something I found when searching for interesting links to place here. The information is interesting, but I found the questions posed about things the story left unanswered were intriguing to consider.
This is a male blogger's take on the story after reading it for the first time, and he is also on a journey to explore more fiction in general. I found looking at what he had to say interesting.
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