Hills Like White Elephants

    I’m sitting here trying to think of my first reaction to Hills Like White Elephants, and honestly, I can’t think of one. When I first started reading, I assumed they were in Africa, knowing Hemingway’s history of writing of the dark continent, and the fact that everything seemed to be hot and wild. Oh, and plus the fact that they were talking about elephants, it just screamed Africa to me. Then he mentioned Madrid and Barcelona, so that shut my idea down pretty fast.
    So I got over the fact that I was wrong there and kept reading, hoping to maybe gain a little more insight into what the story actually meant.  There seemed to be two recurring things throughout the body of the story: alcohol and some “thing” that the man and woman were arguing about, and I had no idea what the latter was. I read and I read, but all they seemed to be saying was “should we do it?,” “only if you want to,” “but do you want to?,” “only if you want to.” It was frustrating, and I felt like I was listening to a freshman couple at their first high school dance.
    Finally though, towards the end, something started clicking. Love was brought up. The man said no matter what she did, he would love her either way like he loves her now, and more things of this matter. An idea had popped into my head. “Marriage!” I though. “They are one of those weird couple who are too scared to take that final step of marriage even though they love each other!” I was so content with myself, and as they story ended, I felt like a literary genius.
    Noooooope. I decided I’d look up an analysis of the story for a better look into it, and practically every one of them started with “this story is an obvious symbol of the struggles of abortion.” Well crap. But as I looked back at the story and thought more about it, I actually found abortion to be the most obvious symbol in the story. The heat in the beginning setting a tense tone right off the bat, and as the website stated, the two train directions representing the two ways they could go with their life: settling down or continue their adventurous lifestyle.
    It’s funny how Hemingway works, using the physical aspects of places and things to represent emotion and feeling so well. But I like it, his stories can always be presented like a portrait of the African savannah, but in reality be the story of that savannah itself. I’m not sure if that made any sense at all, but it does in my head, and it’s pretty cool.