What happens in “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernesy Hemingway?
This story deftly and painfully captures the difficulty of talking about, or rather around, abortion. The fact that neither person specifies what this “operation” is called exemplifies their communication problem, as does the man’s odd comments about the procedure “letting the air in,” the woman’s fumbling with her metaphor, and the tonal shifts in each person’s remarks, from sarcastic to earnest to resigned. The story, told nearly in its entirety through dialogue, is a conversation between a young woman and a man waiting for a train in Spain. In the early 1920s, an American man and a girl, probably nineteen or twenty years old, are waiting at a Spanish railway station for the express train that will take them to Madrid. They drink beer as well as two licorice-tasting anis drinks, and finally more beer, sitting in the hot shade and discussing what the American man says will be “a simple operation” for the girl. As they talk, it becomes clear that the young woman is pregnant and that th
