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Hemingway's story "Hills Like White Elephants" is often included in curricula of literature and creative writing.1 During the first half century after its publication in 1927, its readers had no doubt how it ended-the girl, Jig, succumbed to the man's wish that she terminate her pregnancy-and even denied the intensity of her initial resistance.2 The volume of critical work on the story surged around 1980, however, with the emergence of new answers to the question "What happens at the end of the story?"3 Hemingway's narrative technique of sharing a minimal amount of information with the reader is partly responsible for its multiple conflicting readings, but as we shall see below, it may not be the only reason for them.
These multiple readings make the story an interesting test case for questions about conflicting interpretations. Why does this story invite such a variety of readings? Which readings can appeal to large readerships? Which readings are only of interest to professionals?4 How are readers influenced by exposure to other readers' readings?
This last question is of particular interest, since reading works of fiction-at least well-known and highly regarded ones-is not an individual but a collective endeavor. Readers are exposed to interpretations by the education system, by book reviews, adaptations to other media, interviews with authors, blurbs, and more. Much of a reader's impression of a work of fiction is not his or her own.
In this article, I will consider all the published readings of the story, and consult the views of ordinary readers through questionnaires.5 My interest in the readings will be restricted to their answers to a single question: "What happens at the end of the story?" To compare these readings, a general terminology of comparative traits of readings will be developed.
The story is very short, with few characters and events. A young couple, "the American" and "the girl with him," (50) are sitting outside a railway station café in the Ebro valley in Spain, waiting for a train that is due in forty minutes en route from Barcelona to Madrid. From their conversation, interspersed with drinks, the reader learns that they have been travelling together for a while, that the girl is pregnant, and that her partner is trying to convince her to...