wspapers bombard this society in the modern humor of 'man as dog' - depicting without censor the idea of men being empathetically ignorant and led by base sexual and simplistic urges. From sitcoms to feature films, today's comedy and societal focus seems to reverse with a vengeance the mentality of media's yesteryear, wherein women, we have been led to believe, were thought of as one-dimensional creatures. In what appears to have started as a hopeful reversal of sexist thought, the age-old battle of the sexes has been taken instead into a U-turn by its nose, flipped and skewered like so many over-zealous movements.In the short story "Hills Like White Elephants," author Hemingway brings forth a tale of the terrible burden set upon a young couple by the advent of an unexpected pregnancy and the decision that it forces them to make. We enter upon the scene at a time when they are in wait to board a train, which presumably will be taking them toward the path of aborting their child. Over the course of the text, we see the frustration of both characters, and are imparted their feelings through both the silence and the infrequent and short burst of conversation between them. Hemingway uses the characters' worry to progress the momentum of the work, as well as the symbolism of the setting in which they find themselves: A train station in the hot sun valley of the Ebro, a river in Spain, between two sets of tracks, clearly representing the apex of this choice they are making. They sit at a table in the shade of the building, which is essentially the point of origin of their life with this child, facing the direction from which they came and its line of barren white hills and brown and dry countryside. On the other side of the station, the side that holds the path they are waiting to take, the landscape is rich and full with grain and mountains and the river.Within the context of the story, there are long pauses, uncomfortable spaces, in which t...
