Narrator and point of view

“Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway is a third-person narration. The narrator is not part of the events, but presents them as an outside observer. Furthermore, the tone of the narrator is distant, and his presence is barely felt in the short story: “ ‘What should we drink?’ the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table” (p. 475, ll. 8-9). The narrator only makes a few observations about who is talking and some of their actions. For this reason, it’s difficult to establish if the narrator is omniscient or not.

The narrator’s presence is felt when offering details about the setting, the train schedule, and the weather, making the story similar to a journalistic report: “It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junc...