An Interpretation of Death inThe Snows of Kiliman jaro

李紅梅

Abstract：The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a famous short story written by Hemingway in 1936. This novels fascination lies in two major techniques used in expression, which are the stream of consciousness and symbolism. No exception, this novel also has the common theme in all of Hemingways works: death. This essay, focused on the relationship between death and the two major techniques used in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, is in order to explore Hemingways attitude toward life and death as well as his view toward writing.

Key words:consciousness; symbolism; death

The Snows of Kilimanjaro was published in Esquire in June of 1936, which is regarded as one of Hemingways most accomplished piece of writing. It was not written in Hemingways general compact structure and realistic style, but in the techniques of stream of consciousness and symbolism. These two means of writing are the two artistic characteristics of this novel. They well expressed the common theme in Hemingways novels: death. This paper will study the relationship between death and the two artistic characteristics of The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and try to explore Hemingways attitude toward life and death as well as his view toward writing.

IDeath and the Stream of Consciousness in The Snows of Kilimanjaro

The use of the stream of consciousness in The Snows of Kilimanjaro was very successful. Hemingway ingeniously combined the passages of consciousness with the theme of death. Thus the flow of the heros consciousness and the development of the story were naturally put in a tune although they seemed to be scattered and disordered.

The approaching of death always makes people recall their whole life in the past, at least many impressive staff. Harry, the hero of The Snows of Kilimanjaro, was a dying poet. He had been scratched by the branches in Africa when the story began. At first, he did not care about the wound so it became worse and developed gangrene till he could not move any more. He could only lie on the cot and wait for the death coming. His thoughts were unprecedentedly active before death. The old days and experiences were thronged in his mind. His whole life was presented in these recollections, mixing with the realistic and the illusion. In fact, it was the shadow of death in his mind which caused him to review his life in his consciousness. Facing the coming death, Harry experienced many different psychological states: fear, resentment, boredom, despair and calm. His minds, which focused on death, were extended to different directions repeatedly, then the whole course of his self-examination was completed in the process.

Generally, the stream of consciousness always emphasizes mans subjective and non-logical expression of his inner world. The author always avoid to intrude into the characters mind in order to let the consciousness be presented in an objective manner to the readers. However, there is always a center when the author organizes the writing materials. Any works written in the stream of consciousness has to center around the conscious flow. In The snows of Kilimanjaro, death is the core. Hemingway developed the story by mixing Harrys memory with realistic life, which naturally switched between the real and unreal, memory and non-memory. In The snows of Kilimanjaro, the realistic description was mainly composed of the dialogues between Harry and his wife. These dialogues were the main threads of the description of realistic life in this story while the old days were expressed in the form of free association. The novel is well developed in a combination of realism and illusion.

The first part of Harrys stream of consciousness was made up by his memory of snow, which reflected Harrys painful experiences in the war. He thought of those lively girls, those innocent Australian and that terrified army deserter. All of them died in the white snow at last. Harry himself was still suffering from the shock. He tried to find a moment of peace from the sustained sports, full-speedy skiing, heavily gambling and unbridled drinking. He had planned to write down all of these stories in the early days but he never began. When Harry was suffering severely from gangrene, it was reasonable for him to recall those experience which was a self-examination to his old life in reality before death.

When Harry woke up from his unconscious wondering, he thought of his wife, who was a rich widow before married him. She married him because “he like what he wrote and she had always envied the life he had”. After the marriage, the woman “had built herself a new life” and Harry “had traded away what remained of his old life”. Now, Harry began to feel disgust at himself and the dirty relationship between he and the woman. At the same time, in order to get rid of the confused and worried felling caused by the ache and fear, he attacked the woman cruelly by some malicious words. Out of his senses, he said， “Love is a dunghill and I am the cock that gets on it to crow” “Your damned money was my armour. My Swift and my Armour”. However, when he calmed down at last, he realized that it was no one but himself who was to be blamed for destroying his whole life. Then he realized he had never loved this woman. But to those women he loved, he always “l(fā)oved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out”. Naturally, Harry recollected his emotional life, which was the second part of his stream of consciousness. His experience in emotion deepened his feeling of disillusion. After the failed marriage with his first wife, he began to dally with many women, but his heart became more and more hollow. He only felt “all the distances seemed wrong”. What made him so dissolute and hollow? It was the war. The war destroyed his ideal, betrayed the tradition, let him feel completely in the dark about his future just as other artists in Paris at the same time. They were the “l(fā)ost generation”. Harry began to doubt if there was any real love in this world. When he “traded away what remained of his old life” to the women, “he slipped into the familiar lie he made his bread and butter by”. The disillusion in spirit led to the end of his meaningful life. He had destroyed himself even before he met the woman. He brought his wife to Africa in order to help him find new life. Unfortunately, he was doomed to die in Africa. He felt tired. He did not want to go into the tent because “it is not worth moving”. He wanted to die “in whispers that you did not hear”. At this moment, he enjoyed a kind of equanimity. His consciousness led him into some happy experience. He thought of his grandfathers gun, the trout stream, the hotel in Tribal, the Palace Contrescarpe and his room on the top of floor… In these places, though in poverty, there was his happy childhood , hard but meaningful. Those wonderful days brought him brief peace and happiness. In those days, Harry was full of ideal and vigor although he was penniless and frustrated. Then he got married. He married a rich woman although he did not love her at all. He could live a rich life but he degenerated soon. What a sharp contrast it was!

Harry got temporary freedom from the happy memory. But the shadow of death is still lies somewhere closely. Grandfather had died early. The boss of the hotel had been a victim of the economic crisis after war. Harry hoped to extricate himself from the shadow of death subconsciously. That was why the herd of exuberant cattle and bright moonlight appeared in his fourth part of stream of consciousness. Nevertheless, the cruelty of the reality made him doubt whether his efforts to begin a new life were worthwhile or not. He was afraid of the tragic ending just like the half-wit chore boy. The poor boy shot that old bastard from the Forks in order to stop him stealing feed. The boy thought he would get a reward, but he got handcuffs instead.

Because of the doubt to his efforts to new life, Harry began to realize that he had destroyed his life long before he married the woman. Since that, Harry did not want to care anything anymore, even death. But he couldn''''t care nothing. Because of the ache, he remembered the tragic death of Williamson, the bombing officer, in the cruel war. The war left Harry a painful memory just like a nightmare so that he felt bored to everything. Although he did not fear death any more, he could not get off it. His body reminded him that he was dying. “He had just felt death come by again.” “It had moved in on him so its weight was all upon his chest, and while it crouched there he could not move or speak.” “He could not breathe.” The separation of Harrys spirit and body was well presented in these vivid descriptions.

Harrys final illusion was the climax of this novel. In this passage, a plane took Harry off the camp where he was waiting for death, and flied to the square top of Kilimanjaro. Just at that time, Harry knew that “there was where he was going”. In fact, this was Harrys final effort for seeking eternity. The flight to the top of Kilimanjaro displayed an eternal theme: The death could destroy a mans body but never his or her spirit. One can get an undying spirit in ones pursuit to the ideal. People can do this and ought to do this.

IIDeath and Symbolism in the Snows ofKilimanjaro

The basic idea of symbolism is to use some sensible or imaginary symbols to represent certain profound meanings. Symbolism gives readers much room for thought so as to achieve good vitality and permanent artistic fascination. Hemingway is keen on describing complicated life in an implicit way. Symbolism is just the right method to achieve his objective. So Hemingway often uses symbolism in his works although he never admits that. He integrates symbolism smoothly into the general structure of the story so that the abstract concepts are changed into visible material. By this way, readers may obtain a special message conveyed by those vivid symbols. They may explore the deep meaning of the symbols naturally.

In The snows of Kilimanjaro, so many incidents about death were displayed in Harrys mind through visible things. Readers were put into a world covered by the wings of death. Take vultures and hyenas for an example. Vultures and hyenas were cruel animals that like to eat dead bodies. So they were closely connected with death. Vultures sailed in the sky at first, then landed, and “were all perched heavily in tree” at last.Hyenas crossed the open every night. But when Harry was dead, it “stopped whimpering in the night and started to make a strange, human, almost crying sound”. All of these descriptions gave us hints about the coming of death. Even the wide shade of a mimosa tree under which Harry lied on at the cot at the storys beginning hinted about his unavoidable death, too.

There are two important symbols in this novel which should be emphasized. One is the white snow. Hemingway names this story The Snows of Kilimanjaro, which sufficiently proved the importance of snow in this novel. The snow symbolizes death. Just at the beginning, the very thing displayed before readers is a snow-covered mountain, which has not any living things. Besides, there are five of seven passages referring snow in Harrys first part of consciousness stream. The setting of snow is all related to death

Several girls tramped in the snows of the mountains in Bulgaria till they were freeze to dead. The deserters two feet were bloody in the snow. The gambler lost all in the snow-bound week in blizzar. The plane bombed the Austrian officers who skied with him ever. All of these pictures were stringed together by snow and had direct or indirect connection with death. They are natural records of the flow of Harrys consciousness as well as symbols of death. Hemingway also gives deep meaning to the snow in his other works. In For Whom the Bell Toll, it snowed heavily just before Robert was going to carry out his mission. The snow aggravated the tasks tremendously and led to Robert''''s death. In The Mountains Like White Elephant, the mountains covered by snow leave a very terrible impression on the girl, who is afraid to die in a law-breaking induced abortion. And in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, although Harry was reluctant to leave this world, the snows, which symbolized death, would come at last. The death theme here has a kind of fatal tragic color.

The other important symbol is that dried and frozen leopard, which appeared at the western summit of the snow-covered 19170-feet-high Kilimanjaro. The dried and frozen carcass of the leopard produces an atmosphere of gloominess and sadness. It obviously is a symbol of death, too. It raises questions to readers: What was the leopard seeking at that altitude? Why does it die there?

The leopard may find nothing on that altitude but death. So does Harry. Why did Harry come to Africa from faraway United States? What did he want to find in Africa? Could he find it? He did not get the pictures of a herd of waterbuck, which should symbolize some kind of ideal, but was unfortunately scratched by a thorn when he moved forward to the waterbuck. Now he has nothing to do but wait for death. Both of the leopard and Harry get a same ending: death. In fact, the readers have had a foreboding that Harry would die at last according to the carcass of the leopard. In another word, the carcass of the leopard expresses the forever nihility, fear and pain of death. However, it not only symbolizes death. It has some more important and deeper meaning. Although “no one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude”, the leopard has got to the highest mountain in Africa at all. It has arrived at “the House of God”. It has reached the unthinkable height. It was not rotten or eaten up by the saprozoic just like other animals that died under the mountain. It was dried. Its carcass was kept so that it becomes an immortal symbol. Through this dead leopard, the theme of death under Hemingways pen has raised to a higher level. That is: Death does not only mean nihility and disillusion. If someone has made efforts to pursue his or her ideal in the living days, his death would be as wide as the world. A man can be destroyed but he can not be defeated.

All of the symbols in The Snows of Kilimanjaro display and deepen the theme of death perfectly. They bring great artistic fascination to this novel. Hemingway successfully uses symbolism in his works again.

IIIHarry & Hemingway

Judging from one perspective, one could say that Harry, the dying author in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, might be regarded as Hemingway himself. So we can try to explore Hemingways attitudes and concepts to life, death and writing from Harrys experience.

Many of Hemingways heroes have a war wound and Harry is no exception. The war has shattered his earlier values. He was infected heavily by the war. So was Hemingway. Hemingway took part in two world wars in his life and was ever shot by more than 200 pieces of shrapnel. With experience in war, Hemingway has his own special understanding toward life and death. On one hand, Hemingway loves life so much. In his eyes, life is omnipresent and eternal. On the other hand, Hemingway hates death deeply. He has understood the cruelty of death when he was hunting with his father in the back woods of Michigan in his childhood. When he grew up, he took part in the war. He experienced death too many times. The wound in his body caused by two world wars exerted great influence on his consciousness throughout his whole life. The love to life and the hate to death as well as the bravery in his character produced a common theme in all of Hemingways works: How should a man face death in this world which has lost all values with only strong emotion remaining? The heroes in Hemingways works never commit suicide. They know how to deal with death when it comes. Facing the coming death, Harry had experienced horror, tiredness, anger and so on. But he never flinched and shirked from the unavoidable death. He presented a kind of grace under pressure toward death. This is just the code of behavior, which is also Hemingways pursuit in his life. Without exception, Hemingways heroes take decisive actions to confront their fates. When they unfortunately lose, they also can sleep peacefully and dream of lion just like Santiago, or to seek eternity on the top of Kilimanjaro just like Harry.

Hemingway thinks that an authors life should be rooted in his continual creation. When he cannot write any more, when his inspiration has dried up, he is as good as dead in fact. Harrys experience embodies this concept well. When Harry lives in the Place Contrescarpe, where located a slum in Paris, he is very close to people and real life. He gets endless inspiration from the poor people. He writes many good works in poverty. He achieves his success step by step in those hard days. In that period, his life is full of happiness and vigor. However, everything is changed when he married the rich widow. He lost his inspiration in the comfortable and luxurious life that followed. “He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook.” In order to get his inspiration back, he comes to Africa with vague hope. He hopes the new surroundings and new experiences can activate his tired heart. He wants to find a kind of resuscitating vitality and creative power. Unfortunately, a small accident ends everything. He only can take with him his rich experience, and feelings to his tomb. Isnt it a serious warning to those writers who do not write anymore for all kinds of reasons? Fortunately, although Harry finally lost in his competition against death, he has actually pursued his ideal in his living days. Although his body died at last, he has found a road that leads to eternity. His spirit achieves eternity if only he pursue.

Harry is dead before his works is done. Hemingway killed himself in 1961 when he could not write any more. We can easily find a common point about their death. They have unfortunately lost their creative inspiration in their final days.

Hemingway always asks him to write out new things in his whole life. He insisted to get writing materials from the real life. Although he had got the highest prize in literature, Nobel Prize of Literature, in 1956, he did not think that it was enough. He could not bear the common life without any creative enthusiasm. He still wanted to get more progresses. He would rather to die than to live in memory and past fame. Maybe, it was just these strict, even harsh requirements caused his tragedy of committing suicide. Nevertheless, he has won eternity from his wonderful experience and unremitting seeking in his whole life. His brave attitude to life, his grace under pressure, his code of behavior, as well as his works, will live in peoples heart forever.

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