A Reading of “Hills Like White Elephants, Ernest Hemingway”

The story starts with the narrator describing the location where the story happens. The image given by the narrator is like an extensive white land which is too bare and unprotected against the Sun to enclose a romantic scene. The no-name, no-identity characters have only forty minutes to rescue the monarchy of desertedness before their saviour, the train, comes to take them to the promised land. There is supposedly just one refuge at the moment and it is the feeble support of a building near the station, thus they enter and a conversation starts which goes on for the whole rest of the story.

The interesting thing about Hemingway’s way of storytelling is that he relates the commonest daily conversations in a way that not only they don’t strain the brain but also they are not boring. The tone of this conversation can be described as unfriendly in general. The girl wants to romanticize the experience and make the scene memorable while the man’s appetite has nothing to do with romance so the girl feels insulted or ignored and takes up a satirical tone at some point when she comments: “Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.” At this point she also refers to “the thing” indirectly for the first time in the story. And “the thing” is mainly there to let them have more fun as the man says here.

Again, at line 35 the girl tries to romanticize but the man ignores her. But suddenly a few lines further he comments on the beer in a nice manner which is welcomed by the girl’s positive reply. The man, though, is only after “the thing” which he calls operation and not even an operation. Their conversation goes on and on around the same topic of “the thing” without really directly clarifying the nature of it to the reader. Between line 60 to 65 the man says that he is worried then he says that he is not worried, the expression of which shows how seriously anxious he is.  

The girl leaves the table and at this point the surroundings are no more frightening and unprotected, but there are trees, grains, mountains and a river in her prospect. Some hopes apparently arose in her and she knows that she is the one who by doing “the thing” kills them all. The man pretends to be hopeful for a wonderful future but he is trying to be persuasive.

When they return to the table, the girl’s prospect gets back to the hopeless side of the valley, and the man gets more and more practical, looking at her and trying to coax her to do “the thing”, indirectly. At this point in the story, the nearest inference that comes to mind is that the two has slept with each other more than once and unexpectedly the girl got pregnant so now the man who is probably much older than her wants to get rid of the bothersome child via abortion.  The girl asks the man to stop talking in a very childish manner by repeating “please” seven times in a row, and by saying that she’ll scream if keeps on talking. She is so lost in her thoughts that she doesn’t hear the woman who tells them about the train’s arrival. The man probably has another family elsewhere or a kind of secret life which he aims to save and hide at the same time. Both feel better after a few minutes of being away from each other which seems to have helped them make their mind. The story is open-ended so the author doesn’t say what their final decision is.

 

Letter of Apology _ Page 24

BMI Hospital,   

Ferdowsi St.,     

October 6^th, 2018

Dear Edward,

Meeting you after this long torturing blue moon this weekend has been my dream every single moment whenever I could close my eyes intending to sleep, for excitement kept me high and up since I heard your angelic voice uttering compassionately we could meet this Thursday in your beach cottage.

How horrible a flood collapsed the rainbow bridge of my hopes just an hour before my flight and what horrendous consequences followed afterwards I simply cannot express within the limitation of ink and paper. Shall a sparrow’s blood be shed to serve the expression of this shock as ink and many a white rose petals be spread to duly substitute the paper; a sophisticated hand is to be hired for the task, for my passionate heart should shatter into the sharpest pieces of sorrow were I to write the trials and tribulations of these terrible past hours.

Instead of me, you will see this letter and I know how deep it hurts you not to see me there on the front porch. Thinking how sad you may feel makes my heart cringe and my bosom quiver. I offer this broken heart along with the most sincere apologies ever offered.

 Your beloved hazel green eyes long for a last glance at your gleaming brown eyes before this forthcoming surgery. I am so lonely and fragile within these cold white walls; desperately wishing for your warm deep embrace.

Looking forward to seeing you as soon as possible.

 

Love,

Ensieh

 

A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also, By Seamus Heaney

A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow (church of the toothless one, the county town of County Wicklow in Ireland) Also

Seamus Heaney

 

In memory of Donatus Nwoga

When human beings found out about death

They sent the dog to Chukwu (Chukwu is the source of all other Igbo deities, and is responsible for assigning them their different tasks. The Igbo people believe that all things come from Chukwu, who brings the rains necessary for plants to grow and controls everything on Earth and the spiritual world.) with a message:

They wanted to be let back to the house of life.

They didn’t want to end up lost forever

Like burnt wood disappearing into smoke

Or ashes that get blown away to nothing.

Instead they saw their souls in a flock at twilight

Cawing (the harsh cry of a rook, crow, or similar bird) and headed back to the same old roosts (nest, where birds rest)

And the same bright airs and wing-stretchings

Each morning.

Death would be like a night spent in the wood:

At first light they’d be back in the house of life.

(The dog was meant to tell all this to Chukwu.)

 

But death and human beings took second place

When he trotted off the path and started barking

At another dog in broad daylight just barking

Back at him from the far bank of a river.

 

And that is how the toad (وزغ) reached Chukwu first,

The toad who’d overheard in the beginning

What the dog was meant to tell.

‘Human beings,’ he said

(And here the toad was trusted absolutely),

‘Human beings want death to last forever.’

 

Then Chukwu saw the people’s souls in birds

Coming towards him like black spots off the sunset

To a place where there would be neither roosts 

Not trees

Nor any way back to the house of life.

And his mind reddened and darkened (abashed!! & angry) all at once

And nothing that the dog would tell him later

Could change that vision. Great chiefs (leader or ruler of a clan) and great loves

In obliterated (When something is obliterated, it disappears or is so damaged, you can barely recognize it.) light, the toad in mud,

The dog crying out all night behind the corpse house.

 

Discussing the poem above, four questions are required to be answered based on Perrine, 673_676. The first one is who is the speaker? This poem is relating the story of Wicklow people and their reaction towards the knowledge of the nature of death from the point of view of a third person observer/ narrator. The second question is concerned with what the occasion is? So Wicklow people learn about death and they don’t find it pleasant to be lost forever, they feel the urge to ask Chukwu for an amelioration of death. They send a dog as the messenger, it gets distracted from its aim; thus a toad conveys the important message but turns everything upside down. The dog can’t undo what the toad did. Then everyone dies, including the toad and the dog. Afterwards comes what is the central purpose of the poem? The purpose of this poem is to tell the story of how by accident, death became so common though unpleasant part of life, although of course it is dramatized. The last question requires us to say by what means is that purpose achieved? The poem wants to say two things one is the unpleasant nature of death and the other is the unreliability of the messengers; to achieve these ends a scene is created where people get the unpleasant information and a messenger is assigned to convey the request to god, then an accidental natural distraction keeps the messenger from accomplishing its goal and the ending goes the opposite way of what people desired.

The image that comes to mind while reading this poem is simply like a village and ordinary folks all worried about death, and a dog running to the god stopping by a river to bark back at another dog, and a toad seeing the scene looking visions.