Journal 10

The short story is very confusing if you just skim over it and it barely seems to make any sense. But there is meaning to almost everything around the characters. There are two characters sitting at a bar in at a train station. One is a man and he is there with his girlfriend/partner who he calls Jig. There are having a conversation about something that is pretty serious and they are indecisive about what to do. The situation is that she is pregnant and they are talking about an abortion. She refers to the hills as white elephants. A white elephant is a term derived from ancient times and it is a sign of a burden. People would give you a white elephant as a gift and it was illegal to get rid of it. It seems nice but in all honesty it was nothing but trouble, they were very expensive to keep up and obviously its not easy to find room for an elephant. The hills were like white elephants to symbolize that the baby was a burden and taking the road of having the baby would ruin their lives, which they talk about. The train station itself was also symbolism for something. They could go in two different directions, on one side there were hills (maybe her pregnant belly) and the other had a nice flat field (a flat stomach, no baby). They ordered a lot of drinks, you could see they were stressed out and wanted to get away from it. They loved to travel as you can see by all the stickers of the different hotels they had been to together. A baby would change their life completely and wouldn't be about traveling and doing what they love anymore.