The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway - Research Paper Example

The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway Hemmingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro is set in Africa amongst an arguably “adventurous or dangerous” background (Vogelmann 2004, p. 1). Even so, the short story is heavily themed by a number of primary human motifs such as death, loss, culture, self-realization, love, and a general feeling for life itself (Vogelmann 2004, p. 1). Hemmingway crafts these themes in with an autobiographical theme which not only addresses the human life but incorporates motifs of human life into the writer’s lost opportunity to be a writer (Ammary 2008/09, 123). Becnel and Bloom (2009) argued that although The Snows of Kilimanjaro focuses on the writer, it incorporates human motifs by revealing the writer’s own passions and remorse (p. 191). In other words, Hemmingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro tells a story about writing and somehow links this story to human themes. To demonstrate the point, Becnel and Bloom (2009) draw attention to the following passage narrated by Harry and taken from The Snows of Kilimanjaro: We must all be cut out for what we do, he thought. However, you make your living is where your talent lies. He had sold vitality, in one form or another, all his life and when you affections are not too involved you give much better value for the money. He had found that out but he would never write that, now, either. No, he would not write that, although it was well worth writing (Hemmingway 2003, p. 12). Becnel and Bloom (2009) noted that from Harry’s perspective, he acknowledges that during his life as a soldier, writer and husband married into wealth he has been “selling vitality” his entire life (p. 191). Therefore Harry is able to connect the demands and passions in life via three seemingly unrelated factors: marriage, the military and writing. The connection begs inquiry in to how each of these factors relate to selling vitality. It is therefore first necessary to understand what Harry means by selling his vitality. Looking further into The Snows of Kilimanjaro some guidance can be found in the following excerpt: He had destroyed his talent himself – 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, by snobbery, by hook and by crook; selling vitality, trading it for security, for comfort (Hemmingway 2003, p. 11). This excerpt informs that selling vitality means sacrificing one’s own talents and ambitions in favour of security and at times in favour of other human frailties: laziness, greed and other exigencies of human weaknesses. In many ways these human exigencies are seductions and inevitably forced Harry to trade the vital elements of his life for greater comforts (Bush 1995, p. 26). Arguably, Harry was unable to succeed at or find complete satisfaction via marriage, soldiering and writing because he had sought comfort and security rather than the art of mastering each of these factors. The selling of vitality from Harry’s perspective thus informs that Harry sold or surrendered something of significance in his marriage, soldiering and writing. He therefore loses something of importance in each of these life roles. That something must be passion as, he suggests that a man must make his living where his talent lies and for Harry, his talent lies in trading vitality or sacrificing his real ambitions in favor of shortcuts to comfort and security. The suggestion is therefore that Harry’s life is disingenuous or at the very least the reader can form the opinion that Harry is only superficially happy as he has sacrificed what he really wants out of life for comfort and security. He has also allowed his pursuits to be compromised by the seductions that lead to or command shortcuts. His marriage into wealth may perhaps demonstrate the point best as he has obviously succumbed to a shortcut to material possessions or the seductions inherent in sloth. Soldiering would obviously provide Harry with material for his writing and at the same time provide Harry with security as it is a way for him to earn a living. However, the underlying task is linking the selling of vitality via marriage, soldiering and writing. In this regard, it is conceivable that Harry’s soldiering experience did not inspire his writing ambitions and his marriage into wealth went even further to destroy his writing ambitions. Harry’s writing ambitions are destroyed because Harry finds escapes from life’s pressures that somehow render him devoid of self-expression. In other words, by seeking comfort and security, Harry is experiencing a superficial happiness and as such he cannot give voice to a vital human emotion: satisfaction. If Harry cannot give voice to human satisfaction, he cannot give an authentic voice to negative human emotions. It is therefore in this way, that Harry traded vitality or destroyed his own creativity and ambitions for writing. He simply focused his energies on security and comfort and along the way lost his passion and creativity. He is left with guilt or remorse. The guilt or remorse comes across through Harry’s regular hinting that by trading vitality he has basically wasted his life, his creativity and his talents. As Fatina (2005) informs: In the pitiless depiction of Harry in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Hemmingway presents feelings of desolation in the reflection of a wasted life. Harry views his life as one of missed opportunities, squandered talent and sellout (p. 97). Harry is expressing a great deal of self-loathing and by doing so he regrets his life’s choices and the outcomes. One gets the impression that should Harry have the opportunity he would live his life differently. Rather than pursuing comfort and security and rather than succumbing to the seductions of life, Harry might very well have focused more intently on what he really wanted out of life and that is writing. Instead he has sold his vitality and missed opportunities such as the experience of soldiering, to write or to be creative. Fatina (2005) suggested that there is more to Harry’s remorse than his simply expressing self-contempt for missing opportunities for creativity. Fatina (2005) suggests that Harry may be a representation of Hemmingway’s own guilt with respect to his own marriage. There was a time when Hemmingway’s affections for this wife Pauline declined and he grew increasingly resentful of the fact that he had to rely on Pauline for financial support. As Fatina (2005) observes of Hemmingway: Despite his artistic success he still relied on Pauline’s money...As he told a friend in 1934, “I was broke when came back from Africa this spring”. Pauline had supported him through his lean years and still supported him in his extravagance (p. 97). Fatina (2005) further suggests that as Hemmingway was writing The Snows of Kilimanjaro, he was no longer in love with his wife Pauline. He may have harbored the belief that he had taken advantage of her and had on an unconscious level placed her in a position to play the dominant figure in their marriage. In turn, this would arouse feelings of remorse in Hemmingway (Fatina 2005, p. 97). This remorse and the relationship between Hemmingway and his wife and its impact on his creativity at that stage of his life may have been the underlying motivation for the creation and portrayal of Harry in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Urgo and Abadie (2004) suggest that in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, there is “something like a climax and culmination in the theme of gesture” (p. 60). There is the uneasy corresponding and overlapping elements of a: life steeped in hypocrisy and dishonesty and the devotion to and skilful creation of a form, an aesthetic pattern (Urgo and Abadie 2004, p. 60). As Urgo and Abadie (2004) Hemmingway presents Harry as the “writer who does not write” and the writer who has wasted his writing skills and ambitions for the comfort and security that come with wealth. His guilt and remorse is exemplified by the fact that Harry expresses feelings of dissatisfaction and loathing for those who have furnished him with the wealth and the resources to satisfy his craving for comfort and security (Urgo and Abadie 2004, p. 60). Urgo and Abadie (2004) explain: Now, dying in characteristic Hemmingway indignity, from a thorn cut received while trying to photograph (unsuccessfully) a herd of waterbuck, Harry summarizes and relieves all the poison of his wasted life by spewing it out once again, primarily at the expense of the woman whose only crime seems to be an ample supply of money and a puzzling capacity to love him (p. 60). It is obvious, that Harry is keenly enrapt in self-awareness. More than anything else he has come to a point in his life where he is expressing self-realization. Harry has come to the realization that he has become trapped by his own precarious choices: trading vitality or more particularly trading his talents for the comforts and security of wealth and the seductions of sloth that accompany wealth. This message is conveyed symbolically in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. The symbolic message is conveyed in many ways throughout The Snows of Kilimanjaro. However, one particular episode stands out. While on his safari in Africa with his wealthy spouse, Harry neglects a leg that is scratched. As a result of this neglect the scratched leg becomes infected to such a point that it is useless to seek medical treatment. Moreover, the safari truck breaks down and airplane summoned is slow to arrive. As Spilka (1997) explains Harry has become: Trapped by circumstances beyond his control and incommensurate with his initial failure to avoid them: he ignored the scratch, he failed to hire a good mechanic to fix the truck, he let his rich wife leave her own people to marry him (p. 212). The scratched leg and the indifference to it and the truck’s maintenance demonstrates the lack of attention to the consequences that might follow from making decisions based on immediate goals and instant satisfaction. Spilka (1997) reports that the reference to the permitting the rich wife to leave her comfort zone and marry him refers to Harry’s tendency to attribute much of his own failures and his current circumstances to his wife. Regardless, “it is a piece of the other minor failures to act well on his own behalf” (Spilka 1997, p. 212). Spilka (1997) expresses the view that the symbolism behind the scratched leg incident is a commentary on the fact that even if one’s life fails, death will always be successful. Death will also truncate one’s “good intentions” (Spilka 1997, p. 212). For instance, Harry intended to use the African safari as a means for stirring his creativity. However, as death catches up with him, that opportunity is seemingly lost to him. Harry responds by resisting the lost opportunity and in the final throes of life he hastily drafts each of the tales he had intended to write. In the final analysis, Hemmingway puts together a number of human motifs by incorporating his own experiences as a writer and as a husband into the character of Harry. The reader learns the frailties of human emotions, desires and procrastination. The reader too comes to some form of self-realization. The underlying message may very well be that while humans may act in a way consistent with the belief that life is too short, the reality of how short life is does correspond with human justification for taking short cuts to happiness. The pursuit of happiness may very well lead to dissatisfaction. A majority of the time, this dissatisfaction may not come to a climax until it is all but too late to rectify it. As with Harry, his own misguided choices did not help him to take a short cut to happiness, but rather only gave him short term happiness and abounding and festering dissatisfaction. It was not until death caught up with him that he came to terms with what he had really wanted out of life and how he had traded that for peripheral or artificial happiness. In other words, happiness and satisfaction are necessarily the same thing. Unfortunately, via Hemmingway’s Harry, the reader learns that human beings may not come to that realization until it is too late. By seeking opportunities for happiness, human beings may in the process neglect opportunities for long-term satisfaction. Bibliography Ammary, S. “The Road Not Taken in Hemmingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Connotations, Vol. 18(1-3), 2008/9: 123-138. Becnel, K. and Bloom, K. Bloom’s How to Write About Ernest Hemmingway. New York, NY: Infobase Publishing, 2009. Bush, L. “Consuming Hemmingway: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in the Postmodern Classroom”. The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 25(1) 1995: 23-46. Fatina, R. Ernest Hemmingway: Machismo and Masochism. New York, NY: MacMillan, 2005. Hemmingway, E. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. New York, NY: Scribner, 2003. Spilka, M. Eight Lessons in Love. Columbia, MI: University of Missouri Press, 1997. Urgo, J. and Abadie, A. Faulkner and His Contemporaries. Mississippi, US: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. Vogelmann, J. Autobiographical Elements in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, by E. Hemmingway. Norderstedt, Germany: GRIN Verlag, 2004. Read More