Dialogue in "Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway

One of the few things that immediately attracted my attention in this piece is how the two characters' dialogue is not revealing many information. It is a casual and realistic conversation between two people with a past, a present and a future. This scene is like a glimpse of their lives. The fact that the dialogue does not reveal many contextual information regarding the tension between these characters creates a three-dimentional story that adds to the realistic feel. It is not explaining, it is showing. The reader immediately knows that there's more to the story than this scene because of the absence of any direct explanations. The narrator is not trying to tell us what is happening between these two people and why but the narrator chooses to show us a part of this couples' life and let us judge for ourselves the situation.

We want to know what will happen and we want to know what has happened. The lack of information does not imply the lack of plot, but the presence of it. The protagonists don't need to say things that the other person knows. This makes the story believable, since the characters know each other and are in a relationship, they don't need to explain every little detail to each other. It is as if this discussion is private, not meant for an audience, that is one of the reasons why a realistic sense is reflected through this piece.