The Dialogue In Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants

The dialogue in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” reveals a man’s and a woman’s incongruent conflict on abortion, and the author’s fundamentally feminist position is visible in the portrayal of the woman’s independent choice of whether or not to keep the baby she is carrying.

The plot is very simple in the story which is less than 1500 words long. A woman and a man spend less than an hour on a hot summers day at a Spanish train station in the valley of Ebro as they are waiting for a train heading for Madrid. Their dialogue takes up most of the space and only few major actions take place. In the beginning of the story they sit drinking at a table outside a bar, and after a while the woman goes to the end of the station but she soon returns and participates in the dialogue. The man then carries their bags to the other side of the rails before he returns to and goes inside the bar for a drink. As the story ends, the man goes back outside and finishes his dialogue with the woman.

The dialogue between the couple tangibly represents the mindset of what has been called The Lost Generation in the “Roaring Twenties”. Set in the 1920ies, individualism and materialism was on the rise (khanacademy.org, par. 9). The time period was also characterised by a post-war emptiness and cynicism (www.telegraph.co.uk, par.14). As such, the modernist story (Keshmeri & Darzikola, p 99) deals with loss of meaningful life, with the sterility and vacuity of the modern world and with the crucial