How Does the Ambiguous Ending of “Hills Like White Elephants” Invite Creative Interpretation?
Author: Martin Munyao Muinde
Email: Ephantusmartin@gmail.com
Date: October 29, 2025
Direct Answer
The ambiguous ending of Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” invites creative interpretation by deliberately withholding resolution to the central conflict between the American man and the girl named Jig regarding an unnamed operation, widely understood to be an abortion. Hemingway employs his signature iceberg theory, presenting only surface-level dialogue while leaving the emotional depth and ultimate decision submerged beneath the text. The story concludes with the man returning from the bar, claiming “there’s nothing wrong” with them, and Jig’s enigmatic smile accompanied by her assertion “I feel fine,” neither of which definitively reveals whether she will proceed with the operation or continue the pregnancy (Hemingway, 1927). This unresolved conclusion compels readers to actively engage with the text, drawing upon textual evidence, character psychology, and symbolic elements to construct their own understanding of the couple’s fate. The deliberate ambiguity transforms passive readers into active interpreters, making each reading experience uniquely personal and intellectually demanding.
What Makes the Ending of “Hills Like White Elephants” Ambiguous?
The ending of “Hills Like White Elephants” achieves its ambiguity through Hemingway’s masterful use of minimalist prose and strategic omission of critical information. The story’s final exchange between the American and Jig occurs after a brief separation when the man carries their bags to the other side of the station and stops at the bar for a drink. Upon his return, he asks Jig how she feels, to which she responds, “I feel fine. There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine” (Hemingway, 1927). This repetition of “I feel fine” creates interpretive uncertainty because readers cannot determine whether Jig is genuinely reassuring herself and her partner, surrendering to his pressure, or employing ironic distance to mask her true emotional state. The ambiguity stems from Hemingway’s refusal to provide internal monologue, descriptive emotional cues, or narratorial guidance that would clarify Jig’s intentions and feelings.
Furthermore, the ending’s ambiguity is intensified by the absence of any explicit statement regarding the couple’s decision about the operation. Throughout the story, the man repeatedly attempts to persuade Jig that the procedure is “simple” and that their relationship will return to its previous state of carefree travel and adventure. However, Jig’s responses oscillate between apparent acquiescence and subtle resistance, as evidenced by her plea for him to “please please please please please please please stop talking” (Hemingway, 1927). The final scene provides no resolution to this tension. Scholars such as Renner (1995) have noted that Hemingway’s technique forces readers to “fill in the gaps” left by the sparse narrative, transforming interpretation into an active creative process rather than passive consumption. This interpretive demand distinguishes “Hills Like White Elephants” from conventional narratives that provide clear resolutions and positions it as a modernist text that reflects the uncertainty and fragmentation characteristic of early twentieth-century literature.
How Does Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory Create Space for Reader Interpretation?
Hemingway’s iceberg theory, also known as the theory of omission, fundamentally shapes the interpretive openness of “Hills Like White Elephants” by deliberately concealing the story’s emotional and thematic depths beneath a surface of seemingly simple dialogue and description. Hemingway himself explained this technique, stating that if a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that readers will feel as strongly as though the writer had stated them explicitly (Hemingway, 1932). In “Hills Like White Elephants,” the operation itself is never named, the couple’s past relationship is only hinted at through their conversation, and the emotional stakes are communicated entirely through subtext rather than direct statement. This strategic omission creates interpretive space because readers must actively reconstruct the submerged seven-eighths of the iceberg using the limited visible one-eighth as evidence.
The iceberg theory operates throughout the story but becomes particularly significant in the ambiguous ending. When Jig looks at the “dry side of the valley” and then at the fertile side with “fields of grain and trees,” Hemingway provides no interpretive framework for understanding what these observations mean to her psychologically or symbolically (Hemingway, 1927). Readers must decide whether her attention to these contrasting landscapes represents an internal debate about fertility and barrenness, motherhood and freedom, or simply environmental observation without deeper significance. Johnston (1987) argues that Hemingway’s omission technique “democratizes” literary interpretation by refusing authorial authority over meaning and instead distributing interpretive power to individual readers. This democratic quality enables multiple valid readings to coexist, with some readers concluding that Jig will assert her autonomy and keep the baby, while others determine that she will submit to the American’s pressure and undergo the abortion. The text provides sufficient evidence for both interpretations while confirming neither, exemplifying how the iceberg theory creates fertile ground for creative engagement.
What Role Does Dialogue Play in Creating Interpretive Ambiguity?
The dialogue in “Hills Like White Elephants” serves as the primary vehicle for ambiguity because Hemingway presents conversation that operates on multiple levels simultaneously—surface meaning, subtext, and emotional undercurrent—without providing readers the tools to definitively decode which level represents the characters’ true intentions. The couple’s exchanges frequently feature non-sequiturs, incomplete thoughts, and statements that contradict their apparent surface meanings. For example, when the American insists that “we’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before,” Jig responds with “What makes you think so?” and then immediately adds, “That’s the only thing that bothers me. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy” (Hemingway, 1927). This exchange demonstrates how dialogue in the story simultaneously communicates and obscures meaning, with Jig’s words suggesting both specific concern about the operation and broader relationship dissatisfaction.
The interpretive challenge intensifies because Hemingway provides no dialogue tags beyond simple “said” attributions and offers no descriptions of tone, inflection, or emotional delivery. When Jig states “I feel fine” at the story’s conclusion, readers receive no information about whether she speaks sincerely, sarcastically, resignedly, or defiantly. Hannum (1997) observes that this dialogic ambiguity reflects modernist skepticism about language’s capacity to communicate authentic emotional experience, positioning the story within broader literary movements questioning representation and meaning. The dialogue’s ambiguity forces readers to become psychological detectives, analyzing word choice, repetition patterns, and conversational rhythms to construct theories about character motivation and intention. Different readers will inevitably reach different conclusions based on their own experiences with communication, gender dynamics, and relationship conflict, making each interpretation a creative act that reveals as much about the interpreter as about the text itself.
How Do Symbolic Elements in the Story Enhance Interpretive Possibilities?
The symbolic elements embedded throughout “Hills Like White Elephants” function as interpretive catalysts that expand rather than limit meaning, with the story’s central symbols—the white elephants, the train station, and the contrasting landscapes—offering multiple valid readings that contribute to the ending’s ambiguity. The title’s white elephants carry particular interpretive weight, as Jig observes that the hills “look like white elephants,” prompting the American to respond that he’s “never seen one” (Hemingway, 1927). White elephants traditionally signify burdensome gifts or possessions that are costly to maintain, and in the story’s context, the phrase invites interpretation as representing the unwanted pregnancy. However, the symbol’s meaning remains unstable because white elephants also connote rarity, value, and sacredness in some cultural contexts, suggesting that what appears burdensome to one character might represent something precious to another.
The story’s setting at a junction between rail lines amplifies symbolic ambiguity by literalizing the couple’s metaphorical crossroads while refusing to indicate which direction they will ultimately travel. Fletcher (1991) argues that Hemingway’s symbolic landscape creates a “spatial metaphor for choice” in which the dry, barren hills on one side contrast with the fertile grain fields on the other, representing opposing futures between which Jig must decide. Yet this symbolic reading itself remains ambiguous because the story never confirms which landscape corresponds to which choice, or whether Jig even perceives the landscapes symbolically rather than literally. The bamboo bead curtain through which the couple views the hills adds another layer of symbolic mediation, suggesting that their perception of reality is filtered, partial, and potentially distorted. These accumulating symbolic elements create interpretive richness because readers can trace meaningful patterns throughout the text while recognizing that Hemingway deliberately declines to confirm any single symbolic schema. This symbolic openness extends to the ending, where readers must decide whether final details like the American’s drink order or Jig’s smile carry symbolic weight or represent merely literal description.
What Does Gender Dynamics Reveal About Interpretive Possibilities in the Ending?
The gender dynamics operating throughout “Hills Like White Elephants” significantly influence how readers interpret the ambiguous ending, with feminist and gender-conscious readings revealing power imbalances that shape the decision-making process and ultimate outcome. Throughout the story, the American exercises conversational dominance, repeatedly steering discussion toward the operation and employing manipulative rhetoric that frames his desires as mutual interests. His statements like “It’s really an awfully simple operation” and “I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything” demonstrate what O’Brien (1989) identifies as “linguistic coercion,” in which the man attempts to minimize Jig’s agency by defining her feelings and experiences for her. The ending’s ambiguity takes on gendered dimensions because readers must interpret whether Jig’s final “I feel fine” represents genuine resolution, coerced compliance, or strategic performance designed to end an exhausting conversation.
Jig’s limited power within the relationship manifests not only through dialogue but through her material dependence on the American, as she apparently relies on him financially and logistically for their travels through Spain. This economic dimension adds interpretive complexity to the ending because readers must consider whether any decision Jig makes can be truly autonomous given her structural vulnerability. Some scholars, including Smiley (2009), argue that feminist readings of the ending must account for how patriarchal social structures in the 1920s severely constrained women’s reproductive autonomy, making the question of Jig’s choice partially illusory regardless of what she decides. Other interpretations emphasize Jig’s subtle resistance throughout the story—her ironic observations, her requests that the American stop talking, her final enigmatic smile—as evidence of emerging feminist consciousness that might culminate in her asserting autonomy in the unnarrated future beyond the story’s conclusion. The ending’s ambiguity thus invites readers to project their own understanding of gender, power, and agency onto the text, with interpretations ranging from pessimistic readings in which Jig capitulates to the American’s pressure, to optimistic readings in which her final statements signal newfound self-possession and independence. These divergent gender-inflected interpretations demonstrate how the story’s ambiguity creates space for ideologically diverse responses that reflect evolving cultural conversations about reproductive rights and gender equality.
Why Does the Setting at a Train Station Matter for Interpretation?
The train station setting in “Hills Like White Elephants” operates as more than mere backdrop, functioning instead as a temporal and spatial metaphor that intensifies the ending’s interpretive ambiguity by establishing narrative urgency while simultaneously emphasizing the transitory, liminal nature of the couple’s situation. Hemingway specifies that the story occurs at “the junction of two lines” with the Barcelona-Madrid express arriving in forty minutes, creating a structural deadline that parallels the biological urgency of the pregnancy decision (Hemingway, 1927). This temporal pressure contributes to interpretive uncertainty because readers cannot determine whether the couple reaches a genuine resolution or merely stops discussing the issue because time has run out. The setting thus raises questions about whether the story’s ending represents decision or deferral, agreement or exhausted silence.
The train station’s liminal quality further complicates interpretation by positioning the characters in a space of transition between origins and destinations, past and future, old life and new possibilities. Kozikowski (1990) observes that train stations in modernist literature frequently symbolize existential crossroads where characters confront life-altering choices without stable ground beneath them. In “Hills Like White Elephants,” this liminality manifests through the couple’s physical positioning between two contrasting landscapes and their temporal positioning between a carefree past and an uncertain future. The waiting room where they sit becomes a space of suspended decision where neither the past nor the future fully exists, only the difficult present of negotiation and conflict. When the American carries their bags “around the station to the other tracks,” this action might symbolize commitment to a particular direction, or it might represent merely logistical necessity without deeper significance (Hemingway, 1927). The setting’s interpretive flexibility allows readers to construct various spatial narratives about movement, stasis, connection, and separation, with the ending’s ambiguity sustained by uncertainty about whether the couple will ultimately board the train together, whether they will travel in the same emotional direction even if physically together, or whether their relationship has already reached its terminal point despite continued physical proximity.
How Does Hemingway’s Minimalist Style Contribute to Multiple Interpretations?
Hemingway’s minimalist prose style, characterized by short declarative sentences, limited adjectives, and sparse description, creates interpretive openness by providing maximum information with minimum guidance about how that information should be understood or valued. In “Hills Like White Elephants,” this stylistic minimalism operates throughout but becomes particularly significant in the ending’s final exchanges. The story’s last paragraph contains only four sentences describing the American’s return from the bar and his brief conversation with Jig, with no elaboration on gesture, facial expression, or emotional tenor beyond Jig’s smile (Hemingway, 1927). This extreme compression demands that readers supply the connective tissue between observed behaviors and internal states, transforming interpretation into an imaginative act of reconstruction rather than passive reception.
The minimalist style’s contribution to interpretive multiplicity extends beyond simple omission to include what critics call “linguistic neutrality,” in which Hemingway’s prose refuses to privilege any particular interpretive framework. Bennett (1997) argues that Hemingway’s style “performs objectivity” by presenting events and dialogue with journalistic detachment, even though the selection and arrangement of details inevitably shapes meaning. This performed objectivity creates interpretive space because readers receive no explicit authorial judgment about which character is more sympathetic, whose desires are more legitimate, or what outcome would be preferable. The minimalist ending exemplifies this neutrality: the text reports that the American smiled at Jig and that she smiled “at him,” but provides no information about the quality, duration, or emotional content of these smiles (Hemingway, 1927). Readers must decide whether these smiles indicate reconciliation, resignation, irony, or merely social performance, with the minimalist prose refusing to adjudicate between these possibilities. This stylistic openness enables the story to accommodate readings from diverse ideological positions—feminist, traditional, existentialist, humanist—because the minimalist prose provides insufficient explicit guidance to exclude any interpretation that can be reasonably supported by textual evidence. The ending’s ambiguity thus stems partly from Hemingway’s stylistic refusal to provide the descriptive and emotional elaboration that would narrow interpretive possibilities.
What Psychological Interpretations Does the Ambiguous Ending Support?
The ambiguous ending of “Hills Like White Elephants” invites diverse psychological interpretations of the characters’ internal states, relationship dynamics, and ultimate decisions, with readers drawing on both explicit textual evidence and implicit psychological theories to construct coherent understandings of character motivation. One prominent psychological reading emphasizes Jig’s potential transformation from dependent passivity to emergent autonomy throughout the story, interpreting her final “I feel fine” as evidence of psychological resolution in which she has internally decided her course of action regardless of the American’s preferences. Proponents of this reading, such as Weeks (1980), point to the progression of Jig’s responses throughout the story, noting how she moves from tentative questions and observations to more direct statements of feeling and finally to the calm assertion of “fineness” that might indicate achieved psychological equilibrium. Under this interpretation, the ending’s ambiguity about external action matters less than the suggested internal transformation, with Jig’s psychological state representing the story’s true resolution even if her ultimate choice remains unnarrated.
Alternative psychological interpretations emphasize trauma, coercion, and the dissolution of authentic selfhood under relational pressure. These readings interpret Jig’s final statements as evidence of psychological surrender in which she abandons her own desires and adopts the American’s perspective to preserve the relationship or simply to end the exhausting negotiation. Benson (1989) argues that the story depicts a form of “emotional attrition” in which sustained pressure gradually erodes Jig’s resistance, making her final claim to feel “fine” represent not genuine wellness but the numbness of capitulation. This interpretation finds support in Jig’s earlier plea for the American to “please please please please please please please stop talking,” which suggests psychological desperation rather than calm deliberation (Hemingway, 1927). The repetition of “fine” in the final line might indicate not reassurance but the hollow repetition of someone trying to convince herself of something she doesn’t truly believe. Still other psychological readings emphasize ambivalence and uncertainty, interpreting the ending as representing Jig’s genuinely divided consciousness in which she simultaneously wants and doesn’t want the child, fears and desires the operation, loves and resents the American. These ambivalence-centered interpretations view the ending’s refusal of resolution as psychologically realistic, reflecting how people often act without complete certainty about their desires or without fully integrated psychological states. The ending’s interpretive openness thus accommodates multiple psychological theories of character, agency, and decision-making, with readers’ own psychological frameworks inevitably shaping which interpretation seems most plausible and compelling.
How Can Readers Continue the Story Beyond Hemingway’s Ending?
The ambiguous ending of “Hills Like White Elephants” not only invites interpretation of what the text presents but also encourages creative continuation that imagines the characters’ futures beyond the story’s temporal boundaries. Readers have developed numerous continuation scenarios that extend the narrative while remaining consistent with textual evidence and character psychology. One common continuation imagines that Jig undergoes the operation but that the procedure, rather than returning the couple to their previous carefree existence as the American promises, instead destroys their relationship either immediately or gradually. This continuation emphasizes the American’s self-deception about the operation’s consequences and Jig’s prescient understanding that “we can’t get it back,” with the unnarrated future proving Jig’s intuition correct (Hemingway, 1927). Such continuations often depict the couple’s separation in Madrid or shortly thereafter, with Jig ultimately discovering autonomy and purpose independent of the relationship.
Alternative continuations imagine that Jig refuses the operation, either explicitly or through passive resistance, leading to various outcomes ranging from the American’s abandonment to his reluctant acceptance of fatherhood to the couple’s negotiation of a new relationship configuration that accommodates parenthood. Smith (2005) notes that reader-generated continuations frequently reveal the interpreter’s own values and assumptions about gender, parenthood, and relationships, with more traditional readers imagining reconciliation and family formation while more feminist or progressive readers imagine Jig’s independence. Still other continuations emphasize ambiguity’s persistence, imagining that the couple boards the train without reaching a clear decision and that their future remains unresolved, with the question of the operation becoming a chronic source of tension and resentment that poisons their relationship regardless of what eventually occurs. Some creative continuations shift perspective to imagine the story from Jig’s point of view after the American’s departure, exploring her internal monologue and emotional experience during the train journey to Madrid. These reader-generated continuations demonstrate the text’s generative power, its capacity to inspire creative engagement that extends beyond interpretation of existing material to production of new narrative possibilities. The ending’s ambiguity functions as an invitation to collaborative storytelling between author and reader, with Hemingway providing the foundation and readers constructing various superstructures that complete the narrative according to their own creative vision and values.
What Literary Techniques Create the Story’s Interpretive Openness?
Beyond the iceberg theory and minimalist style, Hemingway employs several additional literary techniques in “Hills Like White Elephants” that contribute to the ending’s interpretive openness and the story’s capacity to sustain multiple valid readings. The story’s third-person objective point of view, sometimes called “camera eye” or “dramatic” narration, presents events and dialogue without accessing any character’s internal consciousness, forcing readers to infer thought and feeling from observable behavior. This narratorial restraint prevents authorial guidance about character motivation and instead distributes interpretive authority to readers who must construct psychological explanations for observed actions. The objective point of view becomes particularly significant in the ending when Jig smiles at the American, as readers receive no information about the smile’s emotional content, social function, or relationship to her internal state.
Hemingway also employs strategic repetition throughout the story that accumulates emotional weight while remaining semantically ambiguous. Certain phrases recur with variations—the American’s insistence that the operation is “simple,” Jig’s observations about things tasting like licorice, her repeated plea for silence—creating rhythmic patterns that suggest obsessive preoccupation while never definitively clarifying what the repetition means psychologically. In the ending, Jig’s triple repetition of “I feel fine” exemplifies how repetition can simultaneously emphasize and obscure meaning, with readers divided about whether the repetition indicates conviction, doubt, or ironic performance (Hemingway, 1927). Additionally, Hemingway’s use of indirect dialogue, in which characters speak about the central issue obliquely rather than directly, maintains interpretive openness by never allowing explicit statements that would narrow meaning. The operation itself is “it,” “this thing,” and “the operation” but never named specifically, allowing readers with different cultural contexts and historical knowledge to project different understandings onto the unnamed procedure. Lodge (1992) argues that these accumulated techniques create a text that operates like a Rorschach test, providing sufficient structure to guide interpretation while maintaining enough ambiguity to reveal the interpreter’s own preoccupations and values. The ending’s interpretive openness thus results not from a single technique but from the convergence of multiple literary strategies that systematically withhold the information necessary for definitive interpretation while providing enough detail to make interpretation possible and engaging.
Why Is the Ambiguous Ending Significant to Literary Modernism?
The ambiguous ending of “Hills Like White Elephants” holds particular significance within the literary modernist movement because it exemplifies modernism’s rejection of Victorian narrative certainty and its embrace of fragmentation, subjectivity, and interpretive multiplicity. Modernist literature, flourishing in the early twentieth century in response to World War I’s trauma and rapid social transformation, frequently challenged nineteenth-century conventions of clear moral frameworks, omniscient narration, and resolved plots. Hemingway’s refusal to provide closure in “Hills Like White Elephants” participates in this broader modernist project of representing human experience as fundamentally uncertain, fragmented, and resistant to simple resolution. The story’s ending rejects what Kermode (1967) calls the “sense of an ending” that characterizes traditional narrative, instead offering an ellipsis that acknowledges life’s continuation beyond narrative boundaries without artificial resolution.
The ending’s ambiguity also reflects modernist epistemological skepticism about the possibility of accessing and representing truth, particularly psychological truth about others’ internal states and motivations. By concluding the story without confirming what the characters decide or even how they truly feel, Hemingway acknowledges the limits of representation and the irreducible privacy of consciousness. This modernist concern with subjective experience and the difficulty of communication appears throughout the story’s dialogue, where the characters speak past each other repeatedly, failing to achieve genuine mutual understanding despite extensive conversation. Nagel (2001) argues that modernist literature’s ambiguity represents not authorial laziness or confusion but rather sophisticated engagement with philosophical questions about meaning, certainty, and the relationship between language and reality. The ending’s interpretive openness thus positions “Hills Like White Elephants” within a literary tradition that includes works by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, all of whom experimented with narrative techniques designed to represent consciousness, fragment conventional plot structures, and distribute interpretive authority to readers. For contemporary readers and students of literature, the story’s ambiguous ending offers insight into how modernist writers reconceived the relationship between text and reader, transforming reading from passive consumption of authorial meaning into active collaboration in meaning-making. This modernist inheritance continues to influence contemporary literature, where open endings and interpretive ambiguity remain valued techniques for engaging readers and acknowledging the complexity of human experience.
Conclusion
The ambiguous ending of Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” exemplifies modernist literary innovation by transforming narrative closure from authorial prerogative into reader responsibility. Through strategic employment of the iceberg theory, minimalist prose, objective narration, and symbolic ambiguity, Hemingway creates a text that simultaneously invites and resists definitive interpretation. The story’s final exchange between the American and Jig provides no clear resolution to their conflict about the unnamed operation, instead concluding with gestures and statements whose meanings remain productively uncertain. This ambiguity matters because it democratizes literary interpretation, acknowledging that meaning emerges from the interaction between text and reader rather than residing exclusively within authorial intention or textual structures.
The interpretive possibilities enabled by the ambiguous ending encompass psychological, feminist, symbolic, and biographical readings, with each approach revealing different dimensions of the characters’ situation while recognizing the text’s capacity to accommodate multiple simultaneous meanings. Readers can reasonably interpret Jig’s final “I feel fine” as representing autonomy or surrender, genuine feeling or ironic performance, decision or continued uncertainty, with textual evidence supporting various conclusions without definitively confirming any single interpretation. This interpretive richness ensures the story’s continued relevance across generations of readers who encounter the text from different cultural contexts, historical moments, and ideological positions, finding in its ambiguity space for their own concerns and questions.
Ultimately, the ambiguous ending transforms “Hills Like White Elephants” from a story about a couple’s decision regarding an operation into a meditation on communication, power, agency, and the limits of narrative representation. By refusing to narrate what happens after the story’s temporal boundaries, Hemingway acknowledges that life continues beyond the artificial closure of narrative form, and that the most significant human experiences often resist simple resolution. The ending’s invitation to creative interpretation and continuation ensures that each reader’s encounter with the story becomes a unique collaborative act of meaning-making, fulfilling modernism’s promise to transform literature from finished product into ongoing process. For students, scholars, and general readers, the story’s ambiguous ending offers both interpretive challenge and creative opportunity, demonstrating how literary art can achieve richness and longevity not despite but because of its refusal to provide easy answers.
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