Hills Like White Elephants Identity

In the short story "Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway a couple traveling along the Ebro river to Madrid is confronted with a new identity: that of being a parent. This short story discovers what can happen when an unborn child causes issues in a relationship. One doesn’t want this new identity, while the other wants to accept this change. This story was written in the late 1920s, during this time having children out of wedlock was a disgrace. The way the two characters’ deal with this situation raises the question of public versus private identity. In this story there is a so called “white elephant” in the room, which will determine this whole new identity.

The couple arrives at the train station and they have forty minutes until

This being a reason that she wants to accept this baby and its new identity. She mentions at the beginning about the mountains look like white elephants, in this quote “The hills being described as white elephants may also bring to mind the image of a pregnant belly,” it symbolizes that serene feeling that Jig got while she was looking at those mountains and that shows how happy she would be to keep the baby as her own “white elephant.” The man makes it out to almost seem like an object instead of a baby. When he says “I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.” It kind of implies that he’s selfish which is proved in his next statement when he says, “of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want anyone else. And I know its perfectly simple.” He thinks that the procedure is perfectly simple when in reality it’s a life changing decision that once they make they will never be able to change it. Another symbol in this short story is the train station. It says the “station sits between two rails.” This could be a symbol of a baby inside of a mother’s stomach, by looking at the tracks from above. Between the man and the woman, they see the identity of the baby as two different things, Jig sees it as almost an opportunity and the man sees it as a bump in the road or