Thomas Müller 
Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory in Hills Like White Elephants and The Killers 

Essay from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies – Literature, grade: 2, 0, University of Tubingen (Seminar für Englische Philologie), course: Proseminar, language: English, abstract: Hemingway once said: “If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There are seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.”
Hemingway tended to not tell the reader about how the characters in his stories feel or think.
He lets the reader develop his own ideas about the background or intentions of the characters. This Essay will show and compare the use of this theory in two of Hemingway’s short stories, “Hills Like White Elephants” and “The Killers”.