<p>“Curtain” appears eight times in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” a story of only about 1500 words. Using Roland Barthes’s terms, we may define the curtain as a “useless detail” that creates nothing but the “reality effect,” since it does not have any role to play in the story’s structure, being neither a nucleus, nor a catalyst, nor an index, nor an informant. However, a close reading of “Hills Like White Elephants” reveals that the curtain, though useless to the plot structure, forms a close embodied interaction with the self-consciousness of Jig, the protagonist of the story. “Hills Like White Elephants” thus offers a new possibility to interpret the useless details in narrative: not only can they create the philosophical reality effect of “having-been-there” (Barthes’s words), but also the embodied reality effect in which the useless details provide a material environment for the embodied experience of the characters to start and grow. The creation of the embodied reality effect constitutes an important part of Hemingway’s narrative aesthetics of objects.</p>