The Interpretation of “Hills Like White Elephants” in the Perspective of Transactional Reader-response Theory

Abstract

“Hills Like White Elephants” was first published in the short story collection Men Without Women in 1927. It tells the story of an American man and a girl waiting for a train from Barcelona to Madrid at the station. During the waiting, the male and female protagonists had a series of disputes about whether to do the operation of abortion or not. And this paper tries to interprete this short story from the perspective of transactional reader-response theory by analyzing and representing the process of how reader establish the meaning and produce the poem based on the original text mainly from three aspects—first, determinate meaning and indeterminate meaning; second, the blueprint and the reader’s judgements; third, the polysemy and symbolic meanings.