Literature concepts and historical perspectives

¶ … Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway and "Young Goodman Brown," by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Specifically it will compare the two works and find a common element in the theme and then show how the stories differ in their treatment of that element. Both of these short stories concern how one event can change people forever. "Young Goodman Brown" encounters evil and the devil in the forest and changes his life because of it. The girl in "Hills Like White Elephants" also changes her life because of her pregnancy and her need to please the man she is with. One event changes their lives, and this is the common thread between these two stories.

Both of these stories are about characters that have a life-changing experience and their lives are changed forever. In "Young Goodman Brown," the young man travels through a forest at night and encounters things he does not want to acknowledge or believe. After that, his life is never the same, and the reader sees that throughout the story. He no longer trusts the people around him, even his wife. Hawthorne writes of him at the end of the story, "A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man, did he become, from the night of that fearful dream" (Hawthorne). Hemingway's story, on the other hand, does not follow the girl after her life-changing decision to go ahead with the "operation," which is clearly and abortion, but it is quite clear that her life will never be the same. She says to the man, "I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you'll like it?'" (Hemingway). She is desperate to please him, even though having an abortion is not what she really wants to do, and so, she changes her life and it seems impossible that the couple will ever have the relationship or the love they had before.

These stories have very similar themes, but the reader does have to dig to find them, and they certainly handle these themes in very different ways. Both revolve around central characters, but Hawthorne's method uses narration, while Hemingway's is almost all character dialogue. The characters are central to both these short stories, but they are very different people. Goodman Brown is clearly a pious and spiritual man and evil creates great conflict in him. Hemingway's characters are not spiritual, that is clear from their dialogue and from the fact that they are considering "the operation." Both sets of characters are facing moral dilemmas that will affect them now and later, and they both handle those very differently, and that is another element that sets these two stories apart. The writers were different, they wrote in different eras, and their stories reflect these changes in time and place. Their similarities are there, but so are their differences, and these differences are just as important to both stories' success as their similarities are.