Before death a
man ought to think more about his past life. The same is evident in ‘The Snows
of Kilimanjaro’ of Hemingway. One recurring theme of Hemingway’s work is death,
he mostly talks about it and then in the end one or two characters pass away
without much fuss and commotion.
In The Snows
of Kilimanjaro there are total five flashbacks. Harry and his rich wife Helen
are stuck in the wilderness of Africa, near the Kilimanjaro Mountain. Harry has
developed gangrene: he got the wound while taking a photo of a herd of waterbucks.
He is
frustrated with his life’s overall performance as a writer. He misbehaves with
Helen and keeps drinking whisky-soda. He is of the opinion that he wasted his
life by marrying a rich woman and taken a life of sloth and luxury rather than
working hard
He is so
careless that he didn’t apply iodine on his wound as a result his leg is
rotting day by day, which also indicates that how his soul is rotting day by
day, as he was always indulged in self-infliction intentionally or
unintentionally. While his stay in Africa, Harry ruminates a lot about his past
life’s experiences taken in Paris, Karagatch, Constantinople, etc. Through the
flashback stories of good and bad times spent in different countries including
the war days, one can make out that Harry never had that settled life which he
always thought of. Probably this pain made him so careless that he no more
cares about his life and with a curable gangrene he feels insecure and on the
verge of death.
He had started
good life from Africa. Hence, Africa is the place where he hoped to start life
afresh. But he thinks he is going to die of gangrene; he’s grown pessimistic of
the same. On the other side, Helen is optimistic about finding a solution and
is of the opinion that soon a plane would come from Nairobi to take them away. The
woman takes care of him but he feels no gratitude for her, rather blames her
for his decline.
One night he
dreams of the plane and a man called Compton, he is on the plane, beneath he
sees the plain and its dust and as the plane rises he experiences the white
snows of Kilimanjaro which gives him the feeling that he is being taken to a
paradise or to place where god exists.
Soon around midnight
Helen wakes up to the whining hyena. In the torchlight she sees the hyena and Harry
lying dead in his cot, the dressing bandage from his wounded leg has been
disappeared.
The writer has
made contrast difference between the plain landscape and the height of the
mountains Kilimanjaro. The plain and dusty landscape depicts the struggle and
pain of life where as the inaccessible Mountain like Kilimanjaro to which the
writer has referred as the place of god is considered a place like heaven and
the dead leopard there underlines the value of immortality. Just before death,
Harry experiences the paradise-like place on the snow-covered top of
Kilimanjaro.
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