How Does Hemingway’s Minimalist Style Affect Reader Interpretation of the Central Conflict in “Hills Like White Elephants”?
Author: MARTIN MUNYAO MUINDE
Email: Ephantusmartin@gmail.com
Direct Answer
Hemingway’s minimalist style in “Hills Like White Elephants” profoundly affects reader interpretation by forcing active participation in meaning-making rather than passive consumption of explicitly stated information. The minimalist approach—characterized by sparse dialogue, elimination of authorial commentary, objective description, and strategic omission of crucial details—requires readers to infer the central conflict about abortion from contextual clues, symbolic imagery, and what characters avoid saying directly. This interpretive demand transforms readers into co-creators of meaning who must decode subtext, recognize patterns in seemingly casual conversation, and construct psychological depth from external behavioral evidence alone. The minimalist style generates multiple valid interpretations because Hemingway provides insufficient explicit information to support a single definitive reading, creating interpretive ambiguity about characters’ motivations, the relationship’s history, and most critically, the story’s resolution. Readers must actively analyze symbolic elements like the barren hills and fertile valley, decode euphemistic references to “the operation,” recognize the power dynamics embedded in the couple’s dialogue patterns, and determine for themselves whether Jig ultimately submits to or resists the American man’s pressure. This interpretive work makes the reading experience more engaging and emotionally impactful, as readers invest intellectual and emotional energy in understanding the conflict, ultimately arriving at conclusions that feel personally discovered rather than authoritatively delivered.
Understanding Hemingway’s Minimalist Literary Style
Ernest Hemingway revolutionized twentieth-century fiction through his development of a radically minimalist prose style that eliminated traditional narrative elements including extensive description, psychological exposition, and authorial interpretation. His minimalism emerged from multiple influences: his early journalism training at the Kansas City Star, which demanded factual accuracy and economy of expression; his exposure to modernist literary movements including imagism and objectivism; and his personal artistic philosophy that valued restraint, understatement, and reader engagement over conventional storytelling techniques (Reynolds, 1999). Hemingway’s style features several distinctive characteristics: short declarative sentences that avoid subordinate clauses; concrete nouns and active verbs that prioritize specificity over abstraction; minimal use of adjectives and adverbs that might indicate subjective judgment; dialogue that reproduces realistic speech patterns while simultaneously conveying subtext; and conspicuous absence of narratorial commentary about characters’ thoughts, feelings, or motivations. This combination creates prose that appears deceptively simple on the surface while containing significant complexity beneath, requiring readers to supply interpretations that traditional narratives provide explicitly.
The minimalist style connects directly to Hemingway’s iceberg theory, which posits that writers can omit the majority of a story’s meaning as long as they understand what they’re leaving out and provide sufficient surface details to guide reader inference. Hemingway articulated this principle in “Death in the Afternoon,” explaining that “if a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them” (Hemingway, 1932, p. 192). This theoretical foundation positions minimalism not as simplification but as sophisticated technique that demands greater reader involvement and produces more powerful emotional effects than explicit statement. The style’s restraint mirrors modernist aesthetic values that rejected Victorian sentimentality and expository excess in favor of objectivity, precision, and emotional control. Hemingway’s minimalism also reflects existentialist philosophical currents emphasizing the inadequacy of language to capture human experience and the necessity of finding meaning through individual interpretation rather than received authority (Stoltzfus, 2005). Understanding these theoretical and historical contexts illuminates how minimalist style functions as more than aesthetic preference, instead representing a fundamental reconception of fiction’s purpose and the reader-text relationship.
The Central Conflict: What Lies Beneath the Surface Conversation
The central conflict in “Hills Like White Elephants” concerns an unwanted pregnancy and the American man’s pressure on Jig to have an abortion, though Hemingway never explicitly names this subject in the text. The couple’s surface conversation about drinks, weather, and the landscape masks their fundamental disagreement about whether to terminate the pregnancy and, more broadly, what kind of life they want together. The man repeatedly advocates for “the operation,” characterizing it as “awfully simple,” “perfectly natural,” and claiming that “it’s really not anything” to minimize its significance and overcome Jig’s evident reluctance (Hemingway, 1927, p. 211). His rhetoric attempts to frame abortion as a minor medical procedure that will restore their previous carefree lifestyle, allowing them to continue traveling and enjoying themselves without the burden of parenthood. Jig’s responses reveal profound ambivalence and growing awareness that the abortion will not save their relationship but instead confirm its fundamental emptiness and inequality.
Beneath this immediate conflict about abortion lies deeper discord about the relationship’s nature, purpose, and future trajectory. The man conceives their relationship as a perpetual adventure focused on pleasure, novelty, and freedom from responsibility, viewing Jig as a companion whose primary value lies in facilitating his desired lifestyle. Jig, conversely, has begun questioning whether their nomadic existence offers genuine fulfillment or merely postpones meaningful engagement with life through constant movement and distraction. Her observation that the hills look like white elephants—traditionally understood as burdensome possessions one cannot dispose of—suggests she views the pregnancy not simply as an obstacle but potentially as an opportunity for transformation toward a more substantial existence (Renner, 1995). The conflict thus encompasses not only the immediate decision about abortion but fundamental incompatibility regarding values, priorities, and visions of a worthwhile life. The man’s inability or unwillingness to understand Jig’s perspective, combined with his deployment of manipulative rhetoric that grants nominal autonomy while applying intense pressure, reveals a relationship characterized by unequal power dynamics and failed communication. The central conflict’s complexity emerges precisely through Hemingway’s refusal to state it explicitly, forcing readers to recognize these multiple layers through careful attention to dialogue patterns, symbolic imagery, and what remains strategically unsaid.
Minimalism’s Effect on Interpretive Ambiguity and Reader Agency
Hemingway’s minimalist style creates significant interpretive ambiguity that fundamentally affects how readers understand the story’s central conflict, as the absence of explicit information generates multiple valid readings that cannot be definitively resolved through textual evidence alone. The most crucial ambiguity concerns the story’s conclusion: readers cannot determine with certainty whether Jig ultimately decides to have the abortion or refuses, whether she capitulates to the man’s pressure or asserts her autonomy, or what their relationship’s future holds. Jig’s final statement that she feels “fine” supports contradictory interpretations—it could signal resigned acceptance of abortion, ironic detachment indicating her decision to resist, emotional numbness suggesting traumatic surrender, or diplomatic deflection postponing confrontation until they’re in private (Weeks, 1980). The minimalist style’s refusal to provide narratorial clarification or access to Jig’s internal state leaves this question deliberately unresolved, positioning readers as active interpreters who must construct their own conclusions based on incomplete evidence.
This interpretive ambiguity grants readers significant agency in meaning-making, transforming the reading experience from passive reception to active construction of narrative significance. Different readers emphasize different textual details as interpretively significant: some focus on Jig’s request that the man “please please please please please please stop talking” as evidence of her growing resistance and potential refusal; others emphasize her statement “I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me” as indicating capitulation driven by self-abnegation (Hemingway, 1927, p. 213). The minimalist style provides insufficient information to adjudicate definitively between these readings, instead allowing multiple interpretations to coexist as equally plausible. This interpretive openness has generated extensive scholarly debate, with critics disagreeing about fundamental questions including Jig’s ultimate decision, the narrative’s stance toward abortion and gender politics, and whether the story offers feminist critique of patriarchal relationships or inadvertently reinforces masculine privilege through its narrative perspective (O’Brien, 1999). The style’s generation of interpretive ambiguity serves multiple functions: it respects the complexity and privacy of reproductive decisions by refusing simplistic moral judgments; it acknowledges the difficulty of understanding others’ internal experiences; and it engages readers more deeply by requiring them to grapple with uncertainty rather than accepting authorial pronouncements. The minimalist approach thus distributes interpretive authority between text and reader, creating collaborative meaning-making that varies across individual encounters with the story.
Sparse Dialogue as Vehicle for Subtext and Psychological Depth
The story’s reliance on sparse dialogue as the primary narrative mode exemplifies how minimalist style affects interpretation by requiring readers to decode multiple layers of meaning embedded within seemingly simple exchanges. Hemingway presents approximately ninety percent of the story through dialogue between Jig and the American man, with minimal narrative description or exposition interrupting their conversation. This dramatic technique forces readers to infer characters’ emotions, motivations, and psychological states from what they say and how they say it, without authorial guidance about internal experience. The dialogue operates simultaneously on surface and subtext levels: characters discuss drinks, weather, and landscape while actually negotiating the abortion decision and their relationship’s future. Readers must recognize that virtually every line contains double meaning, with ostensibly casual remarks functioning as indirect commentary on the unspoken conflict (Hannum, 1997).
The man’s dialogue reveals his rhetorical strategies and emotional limitations through repetition, euphemism, and contradiction. His repeated insistence that the operation is “simple” and “natural” demonstrates his attempt to minimize its significance through linguistic manipulation, while his circular reasoning—claiming he wants only what Jig wants while persistently arguing for a specific outcome—exposes the coercive pressure beneath his ostensible respect for her autonomy. Jig’s responses become increasingly sardonic and resistant as the story progresses, though her exact emotional trajectory remains subject to interpretation. Her observation that “Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for” metaphorically expresses disillusionment with their lifestyle’s promised pleasures, suggesting that anticipated experiences disappoint upon achievement (Hemingway, 1927, p. 211). The minimalist presentation of this dialogue without explanatory commentary requires readers to recognize its metaphorical significance and connect it to the broader conflict about their relationship’s sustainability. The sparse dialogue thus becomes dense with interpretive possibility, each line potentially revealing character psychology, relationship dynamics, and thematic concerns that readers must actively decode. This interpretive work creates engagement and investment, as readers feel they have discovered meanings through their own analytical effort rather than having them delivered through authorial exposition.
Symbolic Imagery and the Requirement for Active Interpretation
Hemingway’s minimalist style extends to his use of symbolic imagery, which he presents without explicit indication of symbolic significance, requiring readers to recognize patterns and construct interpretive connections independently. The story’s most prominent symbolic element—the white hills that inspire its title—appears in seemingly objective description: “The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white” (Hemingway, 1927, p. 210). The narrative offers no direct statement that these hills symbolize barrenness, sterility, or the life-denying choice of abortion, yet readers must recognize this symbolic function to fully understand the story’s thematic complexity. The minimalist presentation of symbols as apparently neutral descriptive details rather than explicitly flagged metaphors demands interpretive sophistication, as readers distinguish between details serving purely realistic functions and those carrying symbolic weight.
The landscape’s dual nature—the barren, sun-exposed hills on one side of the station and the fertile valley with fields of grain and trees on the other—creates a symbolic geography that externalizes Jig’s internal conflict between two possible futures. The minimalist style presents this geographic contrast through simple descriptive sentences without drawing explicit connections to the abortion decision or relationship dynamics, trusting readers to recognize the symbolic parallel between geographic and existential choices. The shadow of a cloud moving across the field of grain introduces natural dynamism and change absent from the static, barren hillside, suggesting possibilities for growth and transformation that the man’s vision of their future excludes (Weeks, 1980). Other symbolic elements including the railway junction itself, representing a crossroads requiring decisive choice; the drinks they consume, suggesting escapism and avoidance; and their luggage covered with hotel labels, materializing their transient lifestyle, all appear as realistic details that simultaneously carry symbolic significance. The minimalist style’s refusal to explicitly mark these elements as symbolic creates interpretive challenges and rewards, as readers who recognize symbolic patterns access deeper meanings while those reading purely at the literal level encounter a simpler but less satisfying narrative. This layered construction allows the story to function on multiple levels simultaneously, accommodating different reading competencies while rewarding careful analytical attention.
The Absence of Psychological Exposition and Interior Access
One of minimalist style’s most significant effects on reader interpretation involves Hemingway’s complete elimination of direct psychological exposition and interior access to characters’ thoughts and feelings. Traditional third-person narratives typically provide readers with privileged access to characters’ internal experiences through techniques including free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness, or straightforward narratorial statements about emotions and motivations. Hemingway’s minimalism rejects these techniques entirely, presenting characters purely through external observation of their actions, dialogue, and physical responses. The narrative never explicitly states that Jig feels conflicted about abortion, that the man is manipulative and self-centered, or that their relationship suffers from fundamental inequality and failed communication. Readers must infer all psychological and emotional content from behavioral evidence, essentially functioning as amateur psychologists who diagnose internal states from external symptoms (Stoltzfus, 2005).
This absence of interior access creates significant interpretive challenges regarding character motivation and emotional authenticity. Without direct access to the man’s thoughts, readers cannot definitively determine whether he genuinely believes his reassurances that abortion will restore their happiness or consciously deploys dishonest manipulation to achieve his desired outcome. Similarly, Jig’s true feelings about the pregnancy, her relationship, and her ultimate decision remain obscured behind her dialogue and limited physical descriptions including that “the girl looked at the ground” or “smiled at him” (Hemingway, 1927, p. 214). The minimalist style’s refusal of psychological exposition forces readers to construct character psychology from incomplete evidence, generating interpretive diversity as different readers assess behavioral cues differently based on their own experiences and psychological frameworks. Some readers interpret the man as deliberately manipulative and emotionally abusive, while others see him as emotionally limited but not consciously malicious; some view Jig as gradually developing resistance and agency, while others see her as ultimately defeated by patriarchal pressure. The absence of authoritative psychological explanation allows these varied interpretations to coexist, making character psychology a matter of reader construction rather than textual certainty. This technique profoundly affects interpretation by positioning psychological depth as emerging through reader engagement rather than authorial declaration, creating characters who feel paradoxically more real precisely because their inner lives remain partially inaccessible, mirroring how we encounter actual people whose interior experiences we can infer but never fully know.
Minimalist Style’s Impact on Emotional Engagement and Reader Investment
The minimalist style’s effect on reader interpretation extends beyond intellectual analysis to influence emotional engagement and investment in the story’s central conflict. By withholding explicit emotional guidance—not stating directly that readers should sympathize with Jig, condemn the man’s manipulation, or feel particular emotions about abortion—Hemingway’s minimalism requires readers to generate their own emotional responses through engagement with the conflict. This approach typically produces stronger emotional reactions than explicit sentimental appeals, as emotions that readers feel they have arrived at independently seem more authentic and personally meaningful than those prescribed by authorial direction. The story’s restraint and understatement create emotional intensity through compression rather than expansion, with unspoken feelings carrying greater power than explicit emotional display would achieve (Flora, 1982).
The minimalist presentation of the couple’s increasingly tense exchange generates anxiety and discomfort in readers who recognize the communication breakdown and failed intimacy beneath their ostensibly calm conversation. Jig’s request that the man stop talking, delivered through repetition of “please” seven times, conveys desperation and exhaustion more effectively than any amount of psychological exposition about her emotional state could accomplish (Hemingway, 1927, p. 213). The emotional impact derives precisely from the restraint of the presentation, the gap between the controlled surface and the intense emotions readers infer beneath. The story’s refusal to provide cathartic resolution or explicit emotional closure leaves readers with unresolved tension that mirrors the characters’ situation, creating lingering emotional effects that continue beyond the reading experience. Readers may feel frustration at the interpretive ambiguity, anger at the man’s pressure tactics, sympathy for Jig’s difficult position, or anxiety about the unresolved conflict—emotions generated through active engagement with the minimalist text rather than passive reception of authorial emotional direction. This emotional investment makes the story more memorable and impactful, as readers carry their own constructed interpretations and emotional responses rather than simply recalling a plot summary or authorial message. The minimalist style thus affects interpretation by making the reading experience more active, demanding, and ultimately more emotionally resonant through reader participation in meaning-making and emotional engagement.
Gender Dynamics and Interpretive Perspectives on Power
The minimalist style significantly affects how readers interpret the gender dynamics and power relations central to the story’s conflict, as the absence of explicit authorial commentary on these issues allows for varied interpretive perspectives regarding whether the narrative critiques or reinforces patriarchal power structures. Feminist literary criticism has extensively analyzed “Hills Like White Elephants” as portraying male coercion and female subjugation within heterosexual relationships, with the American man wielding economic, social, and emotional power over Jig while ostensibly respecting her autonomy (O’Brien, 1999). The minimalist presentation of this power imbalance through dialogue and action alone, without narratorial condemnation of the man’s manipulation or explicit sympathy for Jig’s constrained position, creates interpretive questions about the text’s ideological stance. Some readers find the minimalism enables powerful feminist critique by depicting patriarchal coercion without authorial intervention, allowing the man’s manipulative rhetoric to condemn itself through its own contradictions and allowing readers to recognize the injustice independently.
Alternative interpretations suggest the minimalist style’s apparent neutrality regarding gender dynamics may inadvertently reinforce masculine privilege by failing to explicitly critique the power imbalance or by maintaining narrative focus on the man’s perspective despite Jig functioning as the protagonist. The story provides slightly more dialogue to the American man than to Jig, and his movement and actions (ordering drinks, carrying luggage to the opposite platform) receive more narrative attention than her relatively passive position seated at the table. Some critics argue this focus reflects Hemingway’s own masculine-centered worldview, suggesting the minimalism does not achieve true neutrality but instead naturalizes male dominance by presenting it without explicit challenge (Comley & Scholes, 1994). These divergent interpretations emerge precisely because the minimalist style refuses explicit ideological positioning, instead presenting the conflict through seemingly objective description that readers must evaluate based on their own analytical frameworks and political perspectives. The style’s effect on interpretation thus includes enabling fundamentally different readings of the story’s gender politics, with some readers finding powerful feminist critique and others perceiving masculine bias in the narrative construction itself. This interpretive diversity reflects how minimalism distributes ideological judgment to readers rather than imposing authorial political positions, creating texts that can be claimed by diverse interpretive communities with incompatible political commitments.
The Role of Omission in Creating Interpretive Challenges
The minimalist style’s most distinctive feature—strategic omission of information conventional narratives would include—profoundly affects reader interpretation by creating gaps that require imaginative reconstruction. Hemingway never explicitly identifies “the operation” as abortion, never provides background about the couple’s relationship history or how long they have been together, never explains the circumstances that led to the pregnancy, and never reveals whether the man and Jig have discussed abortion previously or whether this conversation represents their first engagement with the subject. These omissions force readers to construct narrative context from minimal clues, essentially writing the story’s backstory and surrounding circumstances through inference from the presented scene. Different readers construct different contextual frameworks based on how they interpret ambiguous details, leading to varied understandings of the central conflict’s stakes and significance (Barlowe, 2019).
The most crucial omission involves the story’s resolution, as Hemingway provides no explicit information about what decision Jig makes or what happens after the story’s final exchange. This omission of closure represents the ultimate expression of minimalist technique, leaving the narrative’s most significant element entirely to reader construction. The interpretive challenge this creates affects not only understanding of plot outcome but also assessment of character psychology, relationship dynamics, and thematic meaning. If readers interpret Jig as ultimately refusing abortion, the story becomes a narrative of female resistance to patriarchal coercion and the assertion of reproductive autonomy; if they interpret her as capitulating, it becomes a tragedy of female subjugation and the destructive consequences of unequal relationships. The minimalist style provides insufficient textual evidence to resolve this ambiguity definitively, instead requiring readers to make interpretive choices that reflect their own values, experiences, and expectations about gender, relationships, and narrative closure. This radical omission of resolution respects the difficulty and privacy of reproductive decisions while simultaneously engaging readers more deeply through the requirement that they determine for themselves how the conflict resolves. The effect on interpretation involves transforming readers from passive consumers of predetermined narrative outcomes into active participants who must construct endings based on their analysis of character psychology, symbolic patterns, and dialogue dynamics.
Comparative Analysis: Minimalism Versus Traditional Narrative Techniques
Understanding how minimalist style affects interpretation in “Hills Like White Elephants” becomes clearer through comparison with how traditional narrative techniques would present similar material. A conventional third-person narrative might explicitly state that Jig is pregnant, directly identify abortion as the subject under discussion, provide extensive backstory about the couple’s relationship, offer psychological exposition about both characters’ thoughts and feelings, include authorial commentary on the moral dimensions of their conflict, and definitively resolve the plot by revealing Jig’s decision and its consequences. Such a narrative would eliminate most interpretive ambiguity, guiding readers toward a specific understanding of characters, conflict, and meaning through comprehensive information and explicit authorial interpretation (Lodge, 1992).
The minimalist approach produces fundamentally different reading experiences and interpretive possibilities by eliminating these traditional elements. Where conventional narrative provides answers, minimalism poses questions; where traditional exposition explains character psychology, minimalism presents behavioral evidence requiring inference; where typical plots offer closure, minimalism embraces ambiguity. This comparison illuminates minimalism’s effects: increased reader agency in constructing meaning, greater interpretive diversity across different readers, enhanced emotional engagement through active participation, and more memorable reading experiences due to the intellectual and emotional investment required. However, minimalism also creates challenges including potential reader frustration with ambiguity, interpretive disagreements that cannot be textually resolved, and accessibility issues for readers who lack analytical skills or cultural knowledge to decode symbols and subtext. The minimalist style thus represents a trade-off: it gains depth, sophistication, and reader engagement while potentially sacrificing clarity, accessibility, and interpretive consensus. Understanding this trade-off clarifies how Hemingway’s stylistic choices in “Hills Like White Elephants” fundamentally shape reader interpretation by prioritizing ambiguity, inference, and individual meaning-making over explicit statement, psychological exposition, and authorial guidance.
Pedagogical Implications: Teaching Minimalist Interpretation
The minimalist style’s effect on reader interpretation has significant pedagogical implications, as “Hills Like White Elephants” has become a staple text for teaching literary analysis, close reading, and interpretive skills. The story’s compact length combined with its complex submerged meanings makes it an ideal teaching tool for demonstrating how literary texts operate on multiple levels and how readers must actively engage with textual details to construct sophisticated interpretations. Teaching the story typically involves guiding students to recognize symbolic patterns, decode dialogue subtext, identify significant omissions, and construct interpretive arguments based on textual evidence while acknowledging ambiguity and multiple valid readings (Roe, 1990). This pedagogical process models the interpretive work all sophisticated literature requires, using Hemingway’s extreme minimalism as a clear example of principles that apply more broadly.
Students encountering the story often initially find it confusing or frustrating, uncertain what the central conflict involves or how to interpret the ambiguous conclusion. This initial confusion represents a productive pedagogical moment, as it demonstrates the inadequacy of passive reading strategies and the necessity of active interpretive engagement. Teaching minimalist texts helps students develop essential literary analysis skills including identifying textual patterns, connecting details to larger themes, recognizing how form affects meaning, and constructing interpretive arguments that acknowledge complexity rather than seeking false certainty. The story’s interpretive challenges also provide opportunities to discuss how different readers construct different valid meanings, introducing concepts of interpretive pluralism and the role of reader background, values, and experiences in shaping understanding. The minimalist style’s pedagogical value thus extends beyond teaching students about Hemingway specifically to developing broader capabilities for engaging with complex literary texts that reward careful attention and sophisticated analysis. The story’s continued prominence in literature curricula reflects recognition that minimalism, despite its surface simplicity, effectively teaches the active, engaged reading practices that literary study aims to cultivate.
Conclusion
Hemingway’s minimalist style in “Hills Like White Elephants” profoundly affects reader interpretation of the central conflict by transforming the reading experience from passive reception to active meaning-making. Through elimination of psychological exposition, sparse presentation of dialogue without explicit subtext indicators, strategic omission of crucial information including the story’s resolution, and deployment of symbols without explicit interpretation, the minimalist approach requires readers to function as co-creators of meaning rather than consumers of predetermined narrative significance. This stylistic choice generates significant interpretive ambiguity regarding character psychology, power dynamics, moral dimensions of the conflict, and plot outcome, allowing multiple valid interpretations to coexist without definitive textual resolution. The minimalist style distributes interpretive authority between text and reader, creating a collaborative meaning-making process that varies across individual encounters with the story.
The effects of minimalism on interpretation extend beyond intellectual analysis to encompass emotional engagement, as readers invest greater effort and generate stronger emotional responses when actively constructing understanding rather than passively receiving authorial declarations. The style’s impact includes increased reader agency and satisfaction from discovering meanings independently, enhanced memorability through active engagement, and deeper appreciation for literary craft and complexity. However, minimalism also creates challenges including potential reader frustration with ambiguity, interpretive disagreements that cannot be definitively resolved, and accessibility issues for readers lacking analytical preparation. Ultimately, Hemingway’s minimalist style in “Hills Like White Elephants” demonstrates that what writers omit can affect interpretation as powerfully as what they include, and that narrative restraint can generate greater emotional and intellectual impact than explicit exposition. The story’s enduring literary significance derives largely from how its minimalist style engages readers in active interpretation, creating a reading experience that remains challenging, rewarding, and relevant nearly a century after publication.
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