¶ … Kilimanjaro
For many critics, no other short story by Ernest Hemingway is as overtly autobiographical as the Snows of Kilimanjaro. Richard Hovey goes as far to say that the story "must have been (Hemingway's) effort to purge himself of long-accumulated guilts" (83).
This paper examines how the parallels between the story's protagonist Harry and Hemingway reveal a theme of the conflict between financial comfort and the artistic calling. It shows how Hemingway depicts a writer, literally rotting from within, as he reflects on his own moral corruption and the loss of his artistic integrity.
As the story begins, the reader quickly learns that the protagonist, a writer named Harry, is dying. A scratch sustained earlier has become infected and has poisoned his blood, causing a gangrenous infection. Harry knows that death was coming, but he could no longer muster any horror or fear. Instead, all he feels is "a great tiredness and anger and that was the end of it" (41).
Harry's companion on the safari is a wealthy woman named Helen, whom Harry alternately clings to and despises. Helen is a middle-aged widow who is recovering from the recent death of one of her children. She first turns to alcohol and lovers, and eventually, to Harry.
Throughout the story, Hemingway makes it clear that Helen genuinely cares for Harry. Despite being repeatedly called a "rich *****" and his accusations that she ruined him with her money, Helen responds, "I'm only a middle-aged woman who loves you and wants to do what you want to do" (46).
What Harry wants to do, of course, is write. The whole story is filled with snippets of other experiences and stories that Harry had always wanted to write about, but had set aside. These stories, set in italics, told of poor drunkards on the Place Contrescarpe, of a man longing for the same woman from Constantinople to Paris, of the fat bombing officer who had been blown apart by a stick bomb. The stories were all there, waiting to be written, and yet, Harry never did.
During his feverish hallucinations, as he sits waiting for death, Harry alternates between blaming himself and blaming Helen, "this rich *****, this kindly caretaker and destroyer of my talent" (45).
Hemingway wrote the short story a safari with his second wife Pauline Pfieffer. Like Helen, Pauline came from a wealthy family. The safari funded by money from Pauline's family (de Koster, 26-27).
Helen is part of a long tradition of Hemingway's curious portrayals of women, depictions that critic Philip Young describes as "warlike or sentimental" (cited in Fielder 93).
Leslie Fielder characterizes his depictions of women further as "*****es." In The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, Mrs. Macomber kills her husband for putting an end to her affair with their hunting guide. In The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Hemingway presents the loving Helen as a castrating *****, accusing her of using her wealth to pull him away from his writing and exposing him to an aimless life of wealth and celebrity (Fielder 93). Ultimately, this form of living causes him his life and, more importantly, his chance at immortality through his written work.
However, Harry blames himself as well. He recognizes how he has turned his back on his own talent, "by betrayals of himself...by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice" (45).
Harry recognizes that his other personal failures, such as his failed relationships with women, were his fault as well. He has one last chance with Helen, but Harry is already too spent to connect with anyone, especially because "with the women that he loved he had quarreled so much they had finally, always, with the corrosion of the quarrelling, killed what they had together" (48).
Harry struggles hard with the realization that time is running out. The fact that he lies dying, not from an accident but from gangrene, is symbolic of the writer's moral decay.
By clinging to Helen's world of privilege and using her money for the safari that ultimately kills him. In the end, he associates her face with the death mask.
Significant parts of the story are set in italic type, mostly interior monologues about past experiences that Harry now regrets never having written. However, many of the passes also illuminate the theme of Harry's material and spiritual corruption.
The third interior monologue, where Harry finally seeks the woman he loves and two-timed, illustrates Harry's...
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