The snows of Kilimanjaro

By Ernest Hemingway

The story is opened with a passage about Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in
Africa, which is also named the House of God.
Harry, a writer and his rich wife, Helen, are in safari in Africa. Harrys situation does him
irritable, and he talks about his own death in an impassive way that make his wife unhappy,
foreseeing that a rescue plane will never come. He contests her over everything, from whether
she should read to him to whether he should drink a whiskey-and-soda. Helen is evidently
worried for his health and his happiness, but depression and frustration make him awful to her.
Then he starts to trust on his life experiences, which have been varied, and on the fact
that he was sure that he has never developed his potential as a writer because he has decided to
make his living by marrying an agglomeration of wealthy women. In bolded portions of the text
that are generalized throughout the story, Hemingway talks about some of Harrys experiences in
a stream-of-consciousness style.
The first memories of Harry are of traveling around Europe following a battle, hunting
and skiing in the mountains, hiding a deserter in a cottage, hearing about a bombing run on a
train full of Austrian officers and playing cards during a blizzard.
Harry then falls asleep, wakes up in the evening and find Helen coming back from a
shooting expedition. He thinks out on how she is really careful and a good wife to him, but how
his life has been stayed marrying several of women who maintain him as a proud possession
and passing over his true talent, writing. Helen, he memorized, is a rich widow who was bored
by several lovers she took before she met him and who married him because she respected his
writing and they had the same interests.
Then Harry thinks back the process by which he evolved gangrene two weeks before: he
had been making the effort to get a picture of some water-buck and had faulty his knee on a
thorn. He had not applied iodine and it had become septic. As Helen gets back to drink cocktails
with Harry, they make up their dispute.
The second memory sequence of Harry then begins, and he remembers how he once
patronized several of prostitutes in Constantinople while pining for a woman in New York.
Specifically, he had a battle with a British soldier over an Armenian prostitute and then he left
Constantinople for Anatolia, where he ran from an army of Turkish soldiers. Later, he remembers
that he returned to Paris and to his then-wife.

Harry and Helen eat dinner, and then Harry remembers another thing, this time of how
his grandfathers log house burned down. Then he tells how he fished in the Black Forest and
how he was trying to live in a poor quarter of Paris and came down a kinship with his neighbors
because they were poor. Then he remembers an agrarian and a boy he turned in to the authorities
after the boy protected Harrys horse feed by shooting a thief. Next, he remembers an officer
named Williamson who was hit by a bomb and to whom Harry after fed all his morphine tablets.
As Harry collapse on his cot remembering, he recognized the presence of death and goes
by it with a hyena that is running around the edge of the campsite. Currently, Helen has Harrys
cot moved into the tent for the night, and just as she does, he feels death lying on his chest and is
unable to speak.
Harry hopes that it is the next morning and that a man named Compton has come with a
plane to save him. He is carry onto the plane and observes the landscape go by beginings him.
Suddenly, he noticed that the snow-covered top of Mt. Kilimanjaro and he understands that is
where he is bound.
Helen wakes up in the middle of the night to a strange hyena cry and sees Harry dead on
his cot.
This story regards on the self-critical considerations and memories of an author dying of
a safe case of gangrene on safari. Hemingway starts with an epigraph about the leopard who
sought the tip of Kilimanjaro.
Regarding the structure of this story, Hemingway separates it into six parts and within
each of these parts involves a flashback that appears in bold, frequently juxtaposing the hopeless,
frightening present with the past, which often tended full of promise.
In this story there is profusion symbolism. The current significance and meaning of these
symbols has been vehemently debated, but generally, the frozen leopard on the summit of
Kilimanjaro symbolize the death, possibly redemption, and immortality. The hyena and vultures
are related with illness, death, and fear, and Kilimanjaro itself, although its role has glittered the
most controversy among critics, seems related with a sort of redemptive heavenly afterlife. Also,
throughout the story, important plains areas are associated with hard or painful episodes in
Harrys life, including the situation in which he starts the story, and snowy mountainous areas are
associated with his happier, more uplifting experiences, including his last imagined ascent to the
top of Kilimanjaro. In addition, the rotting of the flesh, gangrene, is symbolic of Harrys rotting
soul.
In Hemingway novels and especially in his short stories, the author often utilizes
mountains to symbolize the purity, goodness and cleanness, and he uses the grounds as a symbol
of confusion and evil. This contradistinction has often been debated on. What is not surprisingly,
death is at the element of this story, one of the major themes that occupy again and again in
Hemingway's stories and novels. Death is always present as Hemingway studies how man
behaves and reacts in the face of death. In this case we have a writer, Harry, who never writes

what he has dare to and now it is too late. Death is so near that it can be felt, even in the
attendance of the dreadful, smelly hyena.
The leopard dies trying to get ahead the summit "the House of God". It dies trying to
perform a purpose while the hyenas only role is to look out and ultimately fail. It is death and
comes after Harry. After Harry hears the hyena he knew that death had just come by. Even
though the hyena is symbolically antagonistic toward Harry, they have many comparable
characteristics. It is with Harrys psychological state that the hyena is corelated with. Harry is
representative of the hyena with his scavenger, like qualities and procrastination. His qualities
can be seen in the hyena while he is at the same time trying to possess the qualities of the
leopard.
Harry has wasted his life in the last few years and has now created an attempt to put
himself back on the right track. Significance can be found in the two animals through Harrys
delirious visions, which show him as a weak man that in the past was too afraid exercise his
talent decisively, which was writing. Only now is Harry starting to try and portray the leopard.
A comparison between the leopard and Harry can be discovered again at the end of the
story. Harry has a frail dream of being saved by a plane that cause an unexpected path. Instead of
going to Arusha, the pilot turns to left and flies over the top of Kilimanjaro. He observes the
white square summit of the mountain, unbelievably white in the sun, so enormously huge but so
dignified. Harry was going to the same place that the leopard was found, Heaven.
There are many important differences between the leopard and Harry in relation to the
manner they made it to Kilimanjaro. Distinguished the leopard, which made the difficult climb in
search of the mountains summit, Harry reach out an easier path with a simple plane ride. Again,
Harry is considered more closely as the scavenger like the hyena, than the strong and powerful
leopard.
Another major facet of the leopard that is important to note is that it is found dead.
Immortality now becomes a symbol of valiant leopard. The summit was actually a reward for the
leopard, the reward of one that dared the difficult, avoided the easy. As seen in some of Harrys
stories, he has been a leopard at various times in the past and is striving to become that again.
In terms of style, Hemingway relates the paragraphs between Helen and Harry in a
simple third person format and breaks into bolded stream-of-consciousness for Harrys many
memory sequences. All these memories are frequently conveyed using run-on sentences and
compound of bewildering pastiches of characters, events which are consistent with Harrys
delirium, and places. According to Hemingway, these flashbacks are mostly autobiographical.
Harry is used as a vehicle and Hemingway writes of a log house he explored as a child in
Michigan, of his trial during World War I, of his life in Paris with his first wife and their fishing
trip to the Black Forest, of his skiing trips in Austria, and of a location near the Yellowstone
River in Wyoming.
The all flashbacks themselves correspond concerns about the erosion of values: revenge,
drinking and war, lost love, loose sex. They are combined the hedonism with leaving unfinished

business and sentimentality toward the human condition. In this story, the symbolism of
Kilimanjaro is compared with the symbolism of the plains. When Harry looks at Kilimanjaro, he
sees it as a symbol of truth, idealism, and purity. Harry is dying in the fields from gangrene,
putrid, a stinking, and deadly infection, causing his body to rot and turn greenish black.
The leopard died in a high, clean, well-lighted place. Harry, in contrast, dies rotting and
stinking on the plains, lamenting his wasted life and his failure to complete his desired projects.
Against Harry's background of smelly horror, dark and hopelessness, Hemingway
difference Harry's memories of the best times that he had in the mountains. Good things happen
in the mountains bad things happen on the plains. Hemingway ends his story with Harry's spirit
successful, as when Harry dies, his spirit is released and travels to the summit of the mighty
mountain where the square top of Kilimanjaro is wide as all the world.