I’ve read Hemingway before, so I was fairly confident that I wouldn’t have too much trouble trying to interpret this three-page short story. Yes, his work was confusing, but how much could he do in three pages?
A lot, apparently.
And at the same time, it feels as if Hemingway’s written about nothing at all. The dialogue repeats itself tirelessly over and over again like a broken record until it feels like I’m even starting to think in cheerless, oversimplified sentences. After reading through the story the first time around, I attempted to grasp at the plot. But all I found were words—scattered bits and pieces of the dialogue that had become so ingrained in my memory through the process of repetition that they refused to let go. Among them were:
– “we can”
– “we can’t”
– “perfectly simple”
– “beer”
– “I feel fine”
– “happy”
The American man and the girl are always hinting at something larger through their seemingly mundane conversation, and it gives the reader the sense that there’s a lot more going on behind the talk of white elephants, alcohol and happiness than the simplicity of his work initially leads us to believe. It becomes quite evident that the girl is not fine, and that the two of them are not nearly as happy as they pretend to be. The repetitive wording cloaks the true subject matter of the story, which is only ever implied at best. The two characters skirt around the topic, occasionally touching upon it, but not nearly long enough for us to really comprehend it without an extensive close reading of the material.
And that’s where the title comes into play. Upon finishing the story and looking it over once again, it occurred to me that the story itself was very much like the saying “an elephant in the room.” The idiom is used to describe something very apparent or obvious, but at the same time, goes unaddressed, which is exactly what the American and the girl are doing here. The characters are unwilling to get to the heart of the issue, and thus they continue to keep their conversations pleasantly shallow for fear of disrupting their “happiness.”
