Short Story Review Ernest Hemingway The Snows Of Kilimanjaro

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1936 – various editions. Spoiler alert A highly acclaimed short story by Hemingway with some autobiographical elements in its flashback sequences. During an African safari holiday, Harry, the main character, has received a seemingly harmless thorn scratch to the thigh from a bush he has brushed against. Because he has not treated it right away, the injury has become infected and he has contracted gangrene, which is killing him. He and his millionairess wife, Helen, are marooned by a broken down truck and delays getting a rescue plane out to them. Harry believes local legends of a leopard carcass being frozen forever into the ice at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, which Harry can see from his sick-bed cot. In many ways he envies its high pedestal perch and reverence among the African people. As he is at sea level, he feels held back by the people around him, and resents that if his story is told, they will be his main readership. He feels as if his life, values and soul are rotting, just as his gangrenous lower body is corrupted. He does not distinguish between Helen’s howls of anguish over his fate and the screams of the hyena on the edge of the camp. He is quite mean to Helen, despite her obvious love and care for him. He tells her that he never loved her and that she is just the latest in a long run of wealthy women he has seduced to fund his travels and adventures. Partly in increasing delirium, he thinks back on his life, helping to hide an army deserter, selflessly giving his own morphine rations to a soldier who was severely injured in combat, his decadent card games, his ski-ING trips and big game hunting. He laments leaving it too late to write his memoirs (like Hemingway, he is a writer). Harry’s camp site attracts vultures and the prowling hyena which Harry sees as Death personified. As his fate seems sealed a friend, Compton arrives with a small plane, with room only for Harry and himself. He takes off with Harry without them saying farewell to Helen. As the plane flies over the summit of Kilimanjaro Harry realizes what is really happening. He is not being taken to the great summit to be immortalized on high at all. At the same instant, Helen finds his still, un-moving body in the cot. Harry’s release was entirely in his dying mind. Harry is not a nice man. He hates women in general, not just his current wife. He has only fled to Africa to escape the decadent bohemian middle-class and wealthy bourgeoisie people who fawned over him in Paris. This may reflect on Hemingway time in Paris with such literati as Gertrude Stein, F Scott Fitzgerald and Alice B Toklas. A story about unfulfilled dreams, the realization that we use those we love and that all the great times are doomed to end. It is a very well told story. Sadly, the 1952 movie version, with Gregory Peck and Susan Haywood messes it all up and misses the point. Harry is injured saving a servant from a hippo, not in a trivial scratch accident, his rescue by air is real, his leg an life are saved and he declares his love for Helen. Aaaargghhh! Youtube – Toto – Africa Arthur Chappell