THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO
by Ernest Hemingway, 1936

Often considered one of Ernest Hemingway's major short stories, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" shows the mature author working at the top of his talent to combine a spare, idiomatic style with a richly layered narrative. The story came more than a decade after Hemingway had begun, under the tutelage of Ezra Pound and following the example of James Joyce, to write superb short fiction as if prose were poetry, Unlike such stories from his 1920s collections as "Indian Camp," "The Undefeated," "Hills like White Elephants," and "Big Two-Hearted River," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" allowed him to draw on a complicated tapestry of personal memory and formal narrative.

Hemingway wrote the long story he originally called "The Happy Ending" between February and April 1936. Exuberant after finishing another African story, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," he worked on the narrative through many versions, at least one of them typed by his wife Pauline. Manuscript evidence suggests that he incorporated previously written materials as he composed. Published in the August 1936 issue of Esquire, the story then had no epigraph. It also attributed the praise of the rich to "poor Scott Fitzgerald." When Fitzgerald objected to the use of his name, Hemingway changed it to Julian, a reference to the autobiographical hero of Fitzgerald's story "The New Leaf." But besides references to living people, the story reflects more personal involvement than Hemingway's fiction usually evinced. Near the end of his second marriage and unsettled by European conflict and comparatively hostile reactions to his recent writing, Hemingway was experiencing the bleakness that the character Harry bitterly expresses.

Autobiography aside, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" became a central Hemingway story because in it the author dealt explicitly with themes of broad significance: a person's need to make a good death, the fickleness of fate, and the moral guidance a primitive, natural world such as Africa gave cynical Americans. The story also questioned the hold wealth and privilege had upon the American imagination, for even during the Great Depression value continued to be measured by materialistic standards.

Accompanied by an epigraph about a frozen leopard found near the western summit of Kilimanjaro in a park called The House of God, the story forces the reader to make universal what appears to be a narrative of personal memory as Harry faces death from gangrene. A frustrated and unfulfilled writer on a safari whose leg becomes infected after a minor scratch, Harry never shares his wife Helen's belief that the rescue plane they are awaiting will, in fact, save him. Harry will die from his macabre wound although he has formerly survived much more serious injuries. Hemingway's implication is that the rot that will cause Harry's physical death is a corollary for the spiritual and moral rot that living with the wealthy—and neglecting his talent—has occasioned.

Hemingway's story is about Harry's spiritual death as much as his bodily one. In the devastating dialogue between the writer and his rich, supportive wife, spiritual death dominates. After he announces his approaching death ("The marvellous thing is that it's painless"), he brutally suggests that Helen either cut off his leg, though he doubts that amputation would save him, or shoot him. Irrationally blaming her for his failure as a writer, Harry uses his tirade to denounce her and her money, ending with his denial that he has ever loved her.

Hemingway softens Harry's objectionable character by including a number of flashbacks, printed in italics, that pose as fragments of autobiography. They include the first man Harry saw killed in World War I, who begged for death in order to escape the pain of his ruptured body, Harry's happiness while writing in Paris when the spirit of the new was everywhere, the beauty of skiing in Austria, and the warmth of eating well after hunger. In these flashbacks Hemingway shows a man who has not yet been defeated, who is not yet "bored," as he cruelly answers Helen's question about their life together. Taken with the driving narrative—we read to know whether or not Harry will survive—these reflective moments out of time form a montage that reflects life in its complexity.

Hemingway saves Harry for the reader through his use of animal metaphors. The story is filled with vultures hovering as they wait for Harry's death and, later, with mysterious but stinking hyenas that lurk nearby for the same reason. Described with deft imagery, the hyenas may exist only in Harry's reverie, but the mention of animals forces the reader back to the epigraph, with its noble but dead leopard. Traveling too high up the mountain in search of something unknown, the frozen leopard had died in pursuit. Through juxtaposition Hemingway equates Harry and his writing life with the leopard, and he almost makes the equation work.

Hemingway creates a positive effect by writing two different endings, which plays on the narrative expectation that what appears at the end of a story is its ending. His working title, "The Happy Ending," suggested an ironic oversimplification of the storytelling process, for just as Harry was an ambivalent character rather than a "hero," so his story would be more complex than a conventional "happy" or "sad" conclusion could convey. The first ending, presented without the reader's awareness that there will be a second, describes the plane arriving and rescuing Harry and then flying toward the mountain peak. The euphoria of Harry's delivery is beautifully phrased: "There, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going."

In the second ending Helen awakes at the sound of a crying hyena that had crouched over the sleeping Harry and extinguished his breath, killing him in a scene the reader assumes to be fantasy. She finds her husband dead. Her resulting grief has no connection with the triumph of Harry's assent in the previous ending, and the layering of the two scenes forces the reader to ask a number of questions. What is valuable? What is moral? How does culture judge a person's life or death? The narrative then circles back to Julian's wistful comment about the lives of the rich, making the reader face the fact that wealth had brought Harry only unhappiness—that is, if his view of his life was credible.

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" has been one of the most often anthologized of Hemingway's stories. Not only a complex tapestry of writing styles, it also provides the opportunity for the discussion of gender roles and social issues, particularly in the way Hemingway creates ambivalence in the character of Harry. The story has been filmed, and it has received new critical treatment in Mark Spilka's Hemingway's Quarrel with Androgyny.

—Linda Wagner-Martin