AMERICAN SHORT STORIES

Detailed Summary of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”

The story opens with a paragraph about Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa,
whose western summit is called in Masai the “House of God.” There, we are told, lies the frozen
carcass of a leopard near the summit. No one knows why it is there at such altitude.

The reader is introduced to Harry, a writer dying of gangrene, and Helen, who is with him on
safari in Africa. They are stranded in the camp, because a bearing in their truck's engine burnt
out. Harry's situation makes him irritable, and he speaks about his impending death in a matter-
of-fact, sarcastic way that upsets Helen. He quarrels with her over minute things, from whether
he should drink a whiskey and soda, to whether she should read to him. Helen is obviously
concerned for his welfare, but Harry's frustration makes him talk unpleasantly towards her.

Harry then begins to ruminate on his life experiences, which have been many and varied, and on
the fact that he feels he has never reached his potential as a writer because he has chosen to make
his living by marrying wealthy women. In italicized portions of the text that are scattered
throughout the story, Hemingway narrates some of Harry's experiences in a stream-of-
consciousness style. Harry's first memories consist of traveling around Europe following a battle:
hiding a deserter in a cottage, hunting and skiing in the mountains, playing cards during a
blizzard, and hearing about a bombing run on a train full of Austrian officers.

Harry then falls asleep and wakes in the evening to find Helen returning from a shooting
expedition. He meditates on how she really is thoughtful and good to him, and how she is not to
blame that his talent as a writer has been destroyed. Helen, he remembers, is a rich widow who
lost her husband and a child, was bored by a series of lovers, and eventually "acquired" Harry
because "she wanted some one that she respected with her"; she loves Harry "dearly as a writer,
as a man, as a companion and as a proud possession", while Harry makes it clear that he does not
love her. Harry then recalls how he developed gangrene two weeks earlier: they had been trying
to get a picture of some waterbuck, and Harry scratched his right knee on a thorn. He had not
applied iodine right away, and the wound got infected; because all other antiseptics ran out, he
used a weak carbolic solution that "paralyzed the minute blood vessels", thus the leg developed
gangrene.

As Helen returns to drink cocktails with Harry, they make up their quarrel. Harry's second
memory sequence then begins. He recalls how he once patronized prostitutes in Constantinople
"to kill his loneliness", pining for the very first woman he fell in love with, with whom he
quarreled in Paris and broke up. Harry had a fight with a British soldier over an Armenian
prostitute, and then left Constantinople for Anatolia, where, after running from a group of
Turkish soldiers, "he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen

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much worse". Then Harry recalls that upon his return to Paris, his then-wife inquired about a
letter that was actually from Harry's first love—a reply to the letter he wrote to that woman
(mailed to New York, asking to write to his office in Paris) while being in Constantinople.

Helen and Harry eat dinner, and then Harry has another memory—this time of how his
grandfather's log house burned down. He then relates how he fished in the Black Forest, and how
he lived in a poor quarter of Paris and felt a kinship with his poor neighbors. Next, he remembers
a ranch and a boy he turned in to the sheriff after the boy protected Harry's horse feed by
shooting and killing a thief. Harry ponders: "That was one story he had saved to write. He knew
at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written one. Why?". Then he felt
once again that he'd prefer to be in a different company rather than with Helen, as "rich were
dull". Next, his thoughts wander to beating the fear of death, and the limits of being able to bear
pain. He remembers an officer named Williamson who was hit by a bomb, and to whom Harry
subsequently fed all his morphine tablets. Harry considers how he does not have to worry about
pain in his current condition.

As Harry lies on his cot remembering, he feels the overwhelming presence of death and
associates it with the hyena that has been spotted running around the edge of the campsite. He is
unable to speak. Helen, thinking that Harry has fallen asleep, has him moved into the tent for the
night. Harry dreams that it is morning, and that a man called Compton has come with a plane to
rescue him. He is lifted onto the plane (which has space only for him and the pilot) and watches
the landscape go by beneath him. Suddenly, he sees the snow-covered top of Mt. Kilimanjaro,
and knows that is where he is bound. Helen wakes up in the middle of the night to a strange
hyena cry, and finds Harry unresponsive on his cot.

“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”

-Ernest Hemingway

Short Summary

“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” tells of a writer, Harry, who faces almost immediate death in Africa
from gangrene. A rescue plane is to fly in and rescue him, but his prognosis is grave. In the story,
the great, white, hovering plane arrives, sparkling in the bright sun.

The fact is that the plane does not arrive. What the reader is told is Harry’s final dream. His wife,
Helen, comes into the bedroom and finds him dead. The story is important in the Hemingway
canon because, like A Farewell to Arms and others of his works, it contrasts the mountain

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(purity) to the plain (corruption). Harry spends the last afternoon of his life quarreling with his
wife. Like the protagonist in Henry James’s “The Middle Years,” written in 1882, Harry
bemoans the fact that he has wasted his talent. Harry, the supreme egoist, is morally bankrupt.
The gangrene in his rotting leg is no worse than the spiritual gangrene that has rotted his soul.

In his prefatory paragraph, Hemingway describes and situates Kenya’s Mount Kilimanjaro—at
19,710 feet the highest mountain in Africa. He reveals that close to its summit is the desiccated,
frozen carcass of a leopard, whose presence at that altitude is a mystery. In sharp contrast to the
pure, cold mountaintop and noble leopard are the overheated plain below and the hyena that
emits almost human cries at the moment of Harry’s death, awakening Helen, who finds her
husband dead.

Hemingway places Harry on an acme artistically but shows him being devoured by those for
whom he writes—or, perhaps, like the hyena in Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa, he is
self-devouring. Certainly like Belmonte, the bullfighter in The Sun Also Rises, he is
exceptionally talented but appalled by his audience, represented in the story by Helen and by the
hyena, both of whom weep at Harry’s death. The sustained metaphor of the mountaintop/leopard
and the plain/hyena presents the sharp, controlled contrasts that make “The Snows of
Kilimanjaro” one of Hemingway’s most artistically successful stories.

Separating

- John Updike

Summary

The affluent Maples are getting a divorce, but they cannot decide on the right time to tell their
four children. They finally decide to break the news after their eldest, Judith, 19, returns from
studying abroad in England. Richard Maple hopes to make an announcement at the dinner table,
while Joan prefers to tell the children individually. After bickering, they finally agree that Joan’s
way is better.

As one of his final tasks while he still lives in the house, Richard replaces a lock on the porch
door. Unaware that anything is wrong, his children happily mill around the house as usual. Judith
regales him with stories of her time in England. He sadly reflects that Judith is the only child that
he and Joan “endured together” long enough to raise into adulthood. That night, the Maples serve
a dinner of lobster and champagne to welcome Judith back from her travels. Richard begins to
cry at the table, something his children attempt to ignore.

Eventually John, the second-youngest at 15, asks his mother why Richard is crying. Joan tells the
boy the truth, and talk of the separation ripples through the dinner table. It becomes clear that
Margaret, 13, the youngest child, somehow figured out that her parents were separating and her

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fears are now named. John demands to know why Richard and Joan failed to tell their children
that they were having problems getting along. Richard tries to explain that they do get along but
they don’t love each other, but trails off.

John is drunk from the champagne, and begins playing with matches, holding them close to his
mother’s face. He stuffs a cigarette into his mouth ands shows it to Margaret. Judith warns him
to act mature. After dinner, Richard and John go on a walk, over which John confides that he is
frustrated with his new school as well as the separation. Richard assures John that they will
transfer him to a new school, as “life’s too short to be miserable”.

Later, Joan reprimands Richard for crying at the table, because it made Joan look like the
separation was all her idea. Both parties agree, though, that they are lucky the children didn’t
think to ask whether the separation was caused by “a third person.” They realize that they still
need to inform their second-oldest child, Dickie, 17, who has been away at a rock concert.
Richard will confront him alone, as the boy is most like him.

After sleeping badly, Richard goes to the train station to pick Dickie up after the concert. He
dreads telling Dickie about the separation, and happily procrastinates by driving Dickie’s friends
home. When he finally reveals the news, Dickie is stunned but takes it stoically. Richard
confides that he hates being the bearer of such bad news. On their way home, Richard
acknowledges a home on their block that contains a woman he hopes to marry. When they get
home, Dickie goes to his room without another word.

Joan and Richard go up to say good night to Dickie. They offer to call him in sick to work, but
he declines. As Richard goes to kiss his son good night, Dickie turns and kisses him on the lips
as “passionate as a woman”. With agony, he asks “Why?” Richard realizes that after living with
the decision for such a long time, he has forgotten why he is separating from his wife.

Something to Remember Me By

- Saul Bellow

Louie, the narrator, an old man facing the end of his life, writes a memoir as a legacy to his son,
his only child. The story he tells takes place one freezing day in February 1933, when he was a
seventeen-year-old senior in high school and his mother was dying at home of cancer.

Louie works after school delivering flowers. After dropping off lilies at the apartment of a dead
girl (whom he views in her coffin), he goes to visit his brother-in-law, a dentist who has an office
nearby. The dentist is out, but in the connecting office, in a doctor's examining room, he sees a
naked woman lying on a table, apparently a volunteer for one of the doctor's voyeuristic

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experiments in sexology. She shows no shame, but dresses slowly and asks for Louie's help
getting home. She invites him up to her sleazy apartment, has him strip naked, throws his clothes
out the window to an accomplice, and flees.

Louie puts on the only clothes he can find, a woman's dress, and goes for help. It is dark and
bitter cold and he is overdue at home, where the family is holding a deathwatch. But his brother-
in-law is gone, both the dentist's and the doctor's offices locked. A druggist downstairs directs
him to a speakeasy where his brother-in-law might be. The bartender there, after interrogating
and chastising Louie, gives him a dirty old shirt and tells him to earn carfare by escorting a drunk
home to his two little daughters, a further humiliation.

Louie must cook the children pork for dinner, which disgusts him because he was raised in an
Orthodox Jewish family. He borrows some of the drunk's clothes, takes money for carfare, and
goes home. It is very late when he returns, and his father beats him, but Louie is grateful for the
beating because it means his mother is still alive.

This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona

- Sherman Alexie

Summary

Unlike many of the stories in the collection, this story is narrated in the third person. Victor’s
father dies, and he is devastated although he has not seen him in a few years. Victor wants to go
to Phoenix, where his father lived, to close his father’s savings account and pick up his ashes, but
he doesn’t have enough money to do so. The tribal council normally puts money aside for
situations like this, but they are low on cash and can only give him $100.

Thomas Builds-the-Fire offers to lend Victor the money on the condition that he accompany
Victor to Phoenix. Victor is reluctant because Thomas is known for being eccentric - he tells the
same stories over and over again, and sometimes talks nonsense. They were friends as young
boys but haven’t been close for years. Victor remembers spending the Fourth of July with
Thomas and listening to his stories. With no other option - and some guilt over his behavior
towards his once friend - he decides to take up Thomas’s offer.

Victor remembers a time when he was 15 and beat Thomas badly while drunk. The other boys
watched and did not intervene. Victor only stopped when Norma Many Horses, an older woman,
intervened.

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On the plane to Phoenix, Victor and Thomas sit next to Cathy, a former Olympic gymnast.
Although Victor is initially embarrassed at Thomas’s attempts to converse with her, Cathy is
friendly and they all enjoy talking to each other. When the plane lands, Victor apologizes for
beating up Thomas. They arrive at Victor’s father’s trailer. Because Victor’s father’s body was
not found for a week, the trailer reeks and it is difficult for Thomas and Victor to go in to sort
through the man's things. Victor recalls how Thomas helped him when he got his foot stuck in a
wasp's nest at age 12.

Thomas tells Victor a story about how when Thomas was 13, he had a dream that told him to
walk to Spokane so he could have a vision. Victor’s father found Thomas there, and drove him
back to the reservation on the condition that Thomas promise to watch out for Victor over the
years. Victor remembers a time Thomas jumped off a roof because he believed he could fly, and
did seem to fly for a second before falling to the ground.

After collecting Victor’s father’s ashes, money, and car, Victor and Thomas drive back to
Spokane. As they pass through Nevada, they note that there is no plant or animal life. They
finally see a jackrabbit, and Thomas accidentally runs it down with the car. When they arrive
back in Spokane, Victor and Thomas acknowledge that the trip probably won’t bring them closer
together. However, Victor gives Thomas a portion of his father’s ashes. Thomas promises to
scatter them at the waterfall in Spokane, and asks Victor one favor - to listen to one of his stories,
just once.