In five minutes...

Maurício Lima

In Five minutes...

A young couple is in a dinner or restaurant having a small conversation, but they avoid getting into a touchy subject while waiting the right time for going to the train station. Their conversation is rather light, but with the ironic tone you can notice the tension between the two.

When the two get tired of disguising and postponing what needs to be discussed, the man uses strategies to convince her to perform the operation. Once the girl is not happy with the idea and search cons arguments for such action. It is as if the abortion was necessary so they could move on and be happy. Maybe he just wanted to escape reality and feels nothing for her, once he has not shown the slightest concern for her health. The fact that they are drinking can be detrimental to the pregnancy, but may also be intended to facilitate abortion, as this passage implicates:

"If I do you will not worry?"

"I will not be worried, because it's all very simple."

"Then I do. 'Cause I do not care about me."

"As well?"

"I do not care about me."

"Well, I care about you."

"Oh, I know. But I do not care about me. And I do and everything will be fine."

How could he say it was something simple? And how was the man fine, if she was risking her own health? Surely a child would be a burden, so to both abortion and would put an end to this responsibility. However, is an abortion her wish? She still had the hope that the two remained happy after abortion.

The environment in which the situation had happened is favorable to our understanding. During the whole conversation, the girl uses resources from the environment to illustrate the subject, especially when she says "No it is not. And then you take, you never get back." She is relating the landscape with the fact of taking the baby out of them. Furthermore, she also expressed her fear of the future, maybe she could never get pregnant again.

As to Hemingways’style, he constantly uses symbolism (motifs) that give a more poetic tone and suspense to the story like, the white elephants, the bamboo curtain, the river, the station, the train.

Nobody knows for sure if she actually committed abortion, even if they took the train or not. It is only noticed that it has not been decided and he would not worry about her, once the purpose of the trip was to perform the operation, and they were there together to go to the person who would do it in five minutes.

Maurício Lima

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