"Hills Like White Elephants" is a short story, written by the author Ernest Hemingway. It's the story of a man and a woman who wait at the train station and talk about a problem they never give a name to. I believe this issue is abortion. In this article I will support my thoughts that the girl in the story, Jig, finally decides to move forward and have her baby. Even though the man, who does not have a name, wants her to have an abortion, she will decide to keep the baby. First of all, I will show that it is an abortion that this couple is discussing. The man says it is an "operation", and abortion is an operation. Furthermore, it says it's "just to let air in," which can be interpreted to mean that doctors performing the abortion will let air into the uterus as they remove the fetus. The man says he has "known many people who have done it." Which suggests that this is a common operation. It also shows the moral depravity of the life these people live because so many women have abortions. Finally, the man says he wants their relationship to be "just like we were before". This suggests that the relationship has changed, as it would with a child. If the girl miscarries, things will go back to the way they were before the pregnancy. “The nature of this exchange is that of an argument: the woman wants to have the baby, the man wants her to have an abortion, and both presumably want to change the other's mind,” this is a quote from Donald and Heather Hardys critic on this article (Source 1). What they have to say here is a second opinion in which it compliments my analysis of the story. The reader cannot know how the couple behaved before the pregnancy, however the characters are certainly not written in the sense to appreciate their relationship as they talk about abortion. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned" Get an original essay Now that I have established that the couple is having an abortion, I will establish the behavior of the girl. This is important to understand the direction he decided in the end. At the beginning, the reader glimpses Jig's disgust towards his male partner. He looks at the hills in the distance and says "They look like white elephants". The man replies that he has "never seen one" and then drinks more beer. Jig then replies, "No, you wouldn't have done that"? Donald and Heather Hardy explain their criticism of this quote, "...it exploits the maxim of relationship to generate the implicature that man is too literal-minded to appreciate nature and intimacy through metaphor." The man gets extremely defensive when she says she wouldn't have seen a white elephant. This particular scene is important because it shows that from the beginning of the story Jig looks down on that man and doesn't have much respect for him. The fact that I'm not surprised that I've never seen a white elephant. She thinks he's a narrow-minded pig. A white elephant is something unwanted. And man never deals with things he doesn't want. It simply closes the mind to unwanted objects, as the girl in this scene seems to recognize. An example of man's white elephants is his unborn child. Since we see Jig acting with condescension and sarcasm in the very first scene where the couple talks about white elephants, we must keep this attitude in mind when reading their subsequent conversations. For example, the man's various responses throughout the scene suggest that Jig is not using a sincere tone when she says that she doesn't care about herself. Based on the evidence of the white elephant discussion, we can conclude that Jig is being sarcastic here. She worries about herself and doesn't think