The Hills like White Elephants

In the story of “The Hills like White Elephants” an unknown American guy and a woman named Jig were waiting for train. The story consists entirely of ostensibly documentation of their words and actions when they were waiting for the train. Their conversation is mundane at first, but quickly drifts to the subject of an abortion in which the American is attempting to convince Jig to undergo. The woman looks at the hills across the valley of the Ebro and tries to engage the man in light conversation and responds briefly and unhappily to his assertion. She then stands up, walks to the end of the station, looks at the hills again, speaks angrily and sits back down and demands that man to stop talking and drink in silence, and finally assures him that she feels fine. The only actions of the man not accounted for in this detailing of the woman's movements occur after she asks him to stop talking and before she asserts that she is fine. During that brief period he carries his bags around the station to the other tracks and stops to drink an anisette at the bar alone. The couple has to make a radical choice among the two choices like the two lines of rail pass the station in two opposite direction. The ingenuousness and isolation shows that there is no option to go back from the railroad station. There is no option available to get rid of the situation and they both have to solve it. The hot day make the situation more terrible. The scene of the railway station and White Mountain makes the situation more interesting and it plays a vital role in enlighten the story.

Around the Ebro valley, the hills were huge and white and on this side there was no shade and no trees and the station stood in the sun between two rail lines. Along the wall of the station there was the hot shade of the building and a curtain of bamboo beads hanging in the doorway of the bar, to keep out the flies. The American guy and the woman both sat on the table under the shade of the building. It was very warm and the train would come around in forty minutes. He stopped two minutes in this intersection and then went to Madrid.

Their very first words not only reveal tension between these two but also suggest that there are perhaps fundamental differences between them. The woman is interested in the world around her, concerned with being friendly, vital, and imaginative; the man, on the other hand, is self-involved, phlegmatic, and literal. Hemingway's story deals with the sterility and vacuity of the modern world. The boredom of the man and the desperation of the woman reveal the emptiness of the postwar generation and the crucial necessity of taking responsibility for the quality of one's own life. Hemingway's fiction is filled with a sense of missed opportunities and failed love, ...