Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" is an excellent example of a story that concentrates on the weight around what isn't being said rather than what is. The structure and language chosen especially create a sense of almost tangible tension in the reader.
The structure of the story is based on two brief sections of description at the beginning and end of the story and a mid-section of dialogue between the two main characters. The descriptions as well as the dialogue intrigue the reader with vivid imagery as in the sentence: "the mountains looked like white elephants". This image in particular is also revisited several times in the narration.
Hemingway uses all five senses in his writing to create the unease between the characters and includes descriptions of their surroundings almost as if to amplify the presence of the objects in the vicinity. This can be seen in sentences such as "The country was brown and dry", "The warm wind blew the curtain against the table" and "put her hand out and took hold of two of the sting beads".
This involvement of the senses contributes greatly to the somewhat awkward conversation between the characters and gives a sense that the conversation is so charged one could quite literally hear a pin drop.
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