The story is about a man and a girl waiting for the train to Madrid. The two of them sits down by the store located next to the train station and are drinking beer till the train arrives. The girl mentions that the hills look like white elephants but the man disagrees. Then they start to talk about this simple operation that the girl will be having in Madrid. As they converse, the girl is angry at the man and tells him to stop talking. Then the train is about to come and the man gets up to move the baggage and comes back and asks if the girl is okay. The girl responds by saying that she’s fine.
I did not quite understand what this story was about so I searched for detailed summary of this story and found out that the girl and the man were couples and the girl was pregnant. They assume that the operation is abortion and they are on their way to have the operation in Madrid. I did not know why the play was titled “Hills Like White Elephants” so I looked it up and found out that the hills made the girl foresee the birth of the baby and the color white represented the innocence and purity of the unborn baby.
References
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/990496/ernest_hemingways_hills_like_white.html
http://www.gummyprint.com/blog/hills-like-white-elephants-literary-analysis/
I am glad you did the research. The story makes so much more sense now.
Thanks for the info about what the heck they were talking about. That being said, I’ll have to disagree with your interpintation of the elephants and the baby; in my opinion, the elephant hills represent the “elephants in the room”, simply the topic of the baby and the abortion: never really stated or named.