This essay compares and contrasts how Ernest Hemingway and Doris Lessing depict marital and romantic relationships in their short stories "Hills Like White Elephants" and "To Room Nineteen," respectively. Examining character conflict, gender dynamics, and communication failure, the paper traces how Hemingway's unnamed couple faces an unwanted pregnancy while Lessing's Susan and Matthew Rawlings slowly unravel after childbirth reshapes their identities. Both stories ultimately illustrate how male characters fail to understand their partners' true needs, while the female characters struggle to articulate them directly, resulting in deeply tragic outcomes for each relationship.
The essay demonstrates effective thematic comparison across two literary texts. Rather than treating each story in isolation, the writer identifies a shared thematic concern — the failure of communication between partners — and uses it as an organizing lens. This technique allows each story to illuminate the other, revealing patterns that neither text alone would make as visible.
The essay opens with brief plot context for both stories, then analyzes each in turn before drawing explicit comparisons in the final paragraph. Each body paragraph introduces a story's central conflict, supports it with quoted evidence, and relates it back to the overarching theme of relational dysfunction. The conclusion ties both stories together under the shared theme of tragic miscommunication between the sexes.
Ernest Hemingway and Doris Lessing each examine marital and romantic relationships in their short stories Hills Like White Elephants and To Room Nineteen, respectively. Hemingway's story is set in a bar in northern Spain near a train station and centers on a conversation between a man and a woman as they wait for a train to Madrid — ostensibly so the woman can obtain an abortion. Lessing's story takes place over the course of several years and examines the evolution of the relationship between Matthew and Susan Rawlings, an English couple who married in their late twenties and had four children during the course of their union.
Hemingway does not name the man in his story and refers to the woman only as Jig. The content of their characters is revealed chiefly through their dialogue. The conflict between them is driven by the fact that the man wants to terminate the pregnancy while the woman does not. The man believes that obtaining the abortion will make everything fine — "just like before" (Hemingway 402). However, it is clear to the reader that Jig does not believe this will be the case.
Lessing's story is also driven by conflict between a couple, but in this case the unhappiness is created by the birth of children. Both Susan and Matthew had successful careers when they married; however, with the arrival of their children, Susan was forced to stay at home to raise them, surrendering the identity she had forged for herself through her professional life at an advertising firm. Matthew, on the other hand, held a position as a subeditor at a large London newspaper, a position he was "content" with. Lessing describes their life as "…like a snake biting its tail. Matthew's job for the sake of Susan, children, house and garden…Susan's practical intelligence for the sake of Matthew, children, house and garden" (Lessing 526).
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