“Hills Like White Elephants” shows happiness in a very weird way but one that many people experience in their life. Happiness here is being depicted as something that makes the person you love happy. If the person you love is happy and you made them that way then you are also going to be happy. Many relationships are built upon this notion, a lot of people have some type of run in with this situation. I find it a very weird situation and one that I found I did not like. After a while you start to resent the other person or you feel resentment, at some point the mutual trade of happiness does not equal out. This will causes feelings of resentment and anger and will ruin the entire relationship. I saw this story just like that. The girl seemed like she, personally, wanted that baby but she wanted to make her man happy. She decided to give up that baby to make him happy and yet he had given nothing in return. I see this relationship as breaking up soon and the happiness is short lived. Happiness is sometimes just a mask for something worse.
“Story of an Hour” is very similar to Hemingway’s short story. The woman believes that she is recently widowed and beings to celebrate. She goes through life and realizes that she really was not happy and did not enjoy life. She thought she was happy though, she did not realize it was fake. She did not realize that her happiness was just a mask for something worse, something that would ruin her. These two stories seem to say that happiness is really not such a great thing. I see a common idea, one that says that happiness can be fake or it can be a mask for something worse, something that neither party wants to confront. Jig seemed happier than Louis and yet in the end Louis was the far happier person because she realized what she was missing in her life, even if it caused her death. Jig just went on with her life and is heading for a huge fall.
As a reader, what did you think that the stories tried to accomplish? Did they support the idea that happiness is just a mask or is that me reading far too much into the tone of the stories.
This is one of my favorite songs, its by a famous Ukrainian composer and i just like the way it sounds. It also relates to what i am saying, the video that is. These people really do not seem that happy and yet they want to stay together, it seems like they have bigger problems and they try to mask it. See what you think, fast-forward to 38 seconds
