In "Hills Like White Elephants," how does Hemingway use simple, direct language to create a detached tone in his narrative?The hills across the...

You have identified a key aspect to Hemmingway's tone in
writing that is very distinctive. Certainly his detached tone is incredibly important in
this story, as part of its sheer brilliance is the way that Hemmingway as the omniscient
narrator withdraws completely from the action and allows us to see the characters for
who they are mostly through their dialogue, rather than through their actions. This is a
distinguishing feature of this great short story - very few other texts have such a high
ratio of dialogue to description.

The description you have
quoted is one of the largest sections of description that Hemmingway gives us, but even
in this note how the narrator is incredibly factual and just reports what he sees in a
very objective fashion, attaching no emotions to the scene he creates, allowing the
reader themselves to populate the story with the emotions that they will infer from the
dialogue between Jig and her partner. Note too the short sentences that help contribute
to the factual tone.