Freedom vs Family Theme Analysis

As the story makes clear from the beginning, both the man and the girl are accustomed to a free, uncommitted lifestyle. When the man looks at their combined luggage, it is covered with “labels…from all the hotels where they had spent nights.” The two of them have spent a long time traveling together, going wherever they wanted without restriction. The decision to carry through with the girl’s pregnancy and create a family would completely alter the nature of their relationship. They would have to settle down. Rather than spending nights in hotel after hotel, they would have to build a home of their own. The man very definitively doesn’t want to “settle down” in this way, and thinks it will be easy not to. He is firm in his conviction that this pregnancy is “the only thing that’s made us unhappy” and that getting the abortion will be “perfectly simple” and “perfectly natural.” In a sense, he thinks that the pregnancy is something they can just leave behind the way they would leave a hotel they’d already stayed in.

The girl, on the other hand, maintains a wholly different attitude toward her pregnancy. To her, having a child with her partner promises a world where “we could have everything,” an altogether different definition of freedom. Ultimately, however, she tentatively agrees to the procedure, surrendering her own freedom of choice to a different sort of idea of “family,” as she hopes that doing so will restore the man’s love for her. The story implies, though, through the girl’s initial resistance and then her perhaps too-strong statement that nothing is wrong, that the girl will not be able to so “freely” move on from the pregnancy, and that the man’s insistence on maintaining his definition of freedom has impinged on the girl’s own freedom.