Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants"
Hemingway's short story "Hills Like White Elephants" is set somewhere in Spain along the River Ebro. An American man and a young woman, both of whom are not further identified, are waiting at a bar for an arriving train that is supposed to take them to Madrid. While waiting for the train they have a couple of drinks and overlook the Ebro valley and the white mountains that they can see across the valley. Their conversation is cryptic but it appears that they are discussing whether the young woman should have an abortion, which the man describes as "not really an operation at all. [...] It's just to let the air in."
The young woman appears to have second thoughts on having the procedure done, although both of them never openly address this issue. However, the text and the use of symbolism within the text indicate their emotional struggle to come to a decision. The white mountains, for example, which "were white in the sun and the country was dry," appear to symbolize the man and the woman. This becomes particularly apparent when the woman points out that someone had written "Anis del Torro" across them, the name of a drink that they order soon after making this discovery. When drinking Anis del Torro, the woman states "It tastes like liquorice," to which he replies that everything tastes like liquorice and she replies, "Yes, everything tastes of liquorice. Especially all the things you have waited so long for, like absinthe." This passage seems to suggest that Anis del Torro represents the woman's pregnancy, which now preoccupies their entire internal world (it is "written" all-over them, "everything tastes of liquorice"). However, what the woman says next seems to suggest that she wanted to become pregnant and wanted everything to "taste like absinthe."
The rift between their opinions on what to do also becomes apparent when the train is about to arrive an...