text: "Hills Like White Elephants" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. It was first published in August 1927, in the literary magazine transition, then later in the 1927 short story collection Men Without Women. Later the story was adapted for film in 2002. "Hills Like White Elephants" is a short 38-minute film; British actor Greg Wise played The American.
  Summary
  The story focuses mainly on a conversation between an American man and a young woman, described as a "girl," at a Spanish train station while waiting for a train to Madrid.  The girl compares the nearby hills to white elephants.  The pair indirectly discuss an "operation" that the man wants the girl to have, which is implied to be an abortion, that was taboo to talk about.
  Analysis
  While there is little context or background information about the characters, several scholars have analyzed how the setting influences the story. The expatriate atmosphere is "a motivating factor in character action," writes Jeffrey Herlihy in In Paris or Paname: Hemingway’s Expatriate Nationalism. Setting the piece in Spain "dramatizes the peripatetic subject" and allows the man to discuss abortion outside the "restraints from the behavioral prescriptions of his place of origin." This use of a foreign setting makes Spain not merely a background but "a catalyst of textual irony" in the story.