Hills Like White Elephants Literary Analysis

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Drinking and Giving In Can people love each other if they have an issue of abortion between them? Ernest Hemingway’s short story entitled Hills Like White Elephants is about a girl named Jig and an American man who are having a romantic relationship and are suddenly confronted with the question of having an abortion. While the couple is drinking, Jig asks many questions about her man’s proposition that they should do this. Inferences are conclusions reached by fact or evidence, and the conclusions she reached infer that both realize how they actually feel about having an abortion over the course of the story. The point of this story is that Jig wants to discover the idea of what life will be like after having an abortion. Examining her questions and his responses reveals the meaning of the conclusions that were reached, that abortion made the two heated, then uneasy. As it starts out, Jig and her American male counterpart are having a romantic experience along the train line somewhere called Ebro in Spain near Barcelona. They are drinking and making casual all the while making…show more content…
The whole gist of this sequence is back and forth, he says she says, starting with his “We’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before.” leading to her “What makes you think so? … And you really want to?” (476-477) At this point she must be realizing the fact that he really thinks things will be okay if he has his way with her. He wants it to be this way. Their arguing is somewhat intense and for the duration I always picture the drama and the setting as one featuring a typical drunken couple that just can’t settle their differences. Typical of a woman, Jig is very hasty to find conclusions to the fighting with conceded questions like “And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?”
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