Hills Like White Elephants

7 Pages 1756 Words

The most striking feature of this short story is the way in which it is told. It is not a story in the classical sense with an introduction, a development of the story and an end, but we just get some time in the life of two people, as if it were just a piece of a film where we have a lot to deduce, This story doesn't give everything done for the reader, we only see the surface of what is going on. It leaves an open end, readers can have their own ending and therefore take part in the story when reading.
The story told here is that of a woman and a man in their trip to a place where she can have an abortion. Everything in the tale is related to the idea of fertility and barrenness. This main topic can be seen from the title Hills Like White Elephants, where Hills refer to the shape of the belly of a pregnant woman, and White Elephants is an idiom that refers to useless or unwanted things. In this case the unwanted thing is the foetus they are going to get rid of.
In the beginning we find a narrator that describes with a simple language the area where it is going to take place. We can see that the story happens in Spain, in the Valley of the Ebro, and we also see that the train the characters are going to take is an express train that comes from Barcelona and goes to Madrid, but we don't know exactly where they are or the time ordate in which it takes place, we don't even know if they really take the train. The train here symbolizes change, movement but in some way they are scared of it as movement is not always forward but it can also be backwards in this case in their relationship. It is the "train of life".
Another thing we must take into account is the fact that the train is stopping only for two minutes, a very short time. This limited time symbolizes the time she has to have the abortion, she cannot think it over for a long time first because the later she has the abortion the more risky for her health it gets and second, becaus...