In the short story “Hills like White Elephants” I found it to be a very challenging read. When I read it the first time, I was completely lost. As I started reading it the second time it began to make more sense to me. The first thing about it that caught my attention was the title. To be honest, I really thought that it’d be about some elephants in Africa or something but I was wrong. There were no elephants! The story is about an American man and woman having some beers as they wait for the train to Barcelona. So just through the title, I guess you could say that this is an ambiguous text. The text of Hemingway appears to be simple but then again his works are ambiguous, so his text may be further from the truth. The story makes use of light dialogue some even say that the way Hemingway's characters speak is sometimes more important than what they say so when reading his text you really have to take in the dialogue and decode it. I didn't get what the couple were talking about and then after several readings I found out that it was about abortion. It's really interesting how Hemingway could subtly bring about a message without even having it written directly. The powerful writing of Hemingway definitely has made a huge impact on me. I learned not to take everything too literally and to have patience in order to
