Abortion In Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants

In Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants”, an interesting relationship between a girl and an American boy was introduced. The story seems to be about their discussion of a particular ‘operation’, or more bluntly, the abortion. There are actually more underlying problems to the discussion than there seem to be. This interesting relationship is depicted by the author’s use of intriguing choice of point of view, setting, and concrete details. It is fair to say that after the story concludes, the girl will decide not to have the abortion and will part with the boy because she will eventually realize how problematic their relationship is and how her way of living contradicts his. Initially, the girl is highly dependent on the boy. At the very beginning, the setting of a bar in a

The guy keeps saying that the abortion is “perfectly natural” and “perfectly simple”— he is forcing the girl to have the abortion while he claims that he wouldn't have the girl do it is she “didn't want to”. The guy thinks that the child would anchor him down, which impedes him from living the life that they are leading now— trying one drink after another, changing from one hotel to another, and traveling from places to places. On the other hand, the girl is tired of this unstable lifestyle; she is tired of keeping to“look at things and try new drinks”; she is tired of dealing with all the uncertainties. Moreover, she later on retracts her previous comment on the hills, “they don't really look like white elephants”; by this she implies her wish to keep the unborn child, but the American misses it. The guy thinks that the baby is the “only that bothers” them and he persists the girl to have the operation by saying how he will stay with the girl “all the time” while she does the operation. The girl now realizes how a barely-fixable, problematic relationship it is, and she now knows what to expect from the