Black Man And White Woman In A Dark Green Rowboat Analysis

Abortion is not a ‘women’s only’ issue. Beginning at conception, every pregnancy involves two or more bodies. Typically a man does not have a role in this process. Here we see three short stories that show the readers a range of abortion situations. “Hills Like White Elephants”, Ernest Hemingway shows the readers a woman struggle to make a decision wether she could keep this unborn child or keep her male dominated the relationship. “Good People”, David Foster Wallace is about two young Christian couple who are concerned with ensuring they are making the right decision between abortion and keeping the unborn child. “Black Man and White Woman in a Dark Green Rowboat”, Russell Banks is about a young white woman who decided to get an abortion
“" I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in.” The girl did not say anything. "I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural.” "Then what will we do afterward?” (Hemingway 590). He conveys these rules he sets for himself, especially limiting the amount of description he supplies his readers with. Hemingway has a specific writing style that he developed over time. Which is, “1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ without evasion or cliché. 2. The use of absolutely no word that doe not contribute to the general design. 3. Fidelity to the rhythms of natural speech. 4. The natural object is always the adequate symbol.” “That he’d be thinking about her and feeling bad for her, she knew, but he couldn’t be in there with her. This was so obviously true that he felt like a ninny that he’d kept on about it and now knew what she had thought every time he went and said it—it hadn’t brought her comfort or eased the burden at all. The worse he felt, the stiller he sat.” (Wallace 1). The readers strictly rely on Wallace’s descriptions to understand the story. The readers also only hear inside of Lean’s mind, with only his thoughts and feelings.
“ They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table. "You've got to realize," he said, "that I don't want you to do it if you don't want to. I'm perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you" ” (Hemingway 592). Hemingway portrays the man tries to butter her up and convince her that the abortion will resolve all of their problems. “The appointment was for afternoon, but when the doorbell had rung so early and his mother’d called to him up the stairs, he had known, and a terrible kind of blankness had commenced falling through him. He told her that he did not know what to do. That he knew if he was the salesman of it and forced it upon her that was awful and wrong” (Wallace 2). Lane internally struggles with coping with the possibility of his unborn child being aborted. Little does he know what Sheri feels about this process. “ I'm going to do it. This afternoon. Mother’s coming with me. She called and set it up this morning” (Banks 74). Her mother influenced her to abort the child and she willingly obeyed her mother not considering the man’s