Implication and Omission in Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” Raymond Carver’s “Why Don’t you Dance,” Richard Ford’s “Great Falls,” and Bobbie Ann Mason’s “Shiloh”

Résumé

Ernest Hemingway developed the “Theory of Omission” by which he would deploy interrelated techniques of implication and omission with the aim of strengthening the narrative and creating certain effects on readers. To provide additional evidence with respect tohis influence on the leading figures of American literary minimalism, this article argues that the narrators of Raymond Carver’s “Why Don’t you Dance,” Richard Ford’s “Great Falls,” and Bobbie Ann Mason’s “Shiloh” employ the techniques  of implication and omission in order to engage readers in the construction of meaning and make them feel more than they understand the emotional reality of the marital dissatisfaction, which is left beneath the surface of things, as does Hemingway in “Hills Like White Elephants.” To this end, the analytical and the comparative study is carried out using Wolfgang’s Iser Reception Theory.