General Interest Review 00017

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Reading as the recollections of a writer wounded on safari, lying on his deathbed, the story treats mortality as a tightrope walk. For once in his life, with nothing better to do, he turns inward and looks back at a life lived in full but all-too-often not recorded. As the man is a writer, he laments his inability to properly record all the thoughts he's had, the people he's observed, and what great copy it all would've produced.

It's easy to assume the writer is a shade of Hemingway himself. Living for the moment, on safari, memories of the Great War, memories of Paris, the trappings of the upper classes he's fallen in with. And, really, so be it. To get too caught up in reading into Hemingway's own thoughts is to show that Hemingway is an interesting character. But we already knew that.

The story's real strength is the sensitivity of his tenuous thoughts knowing it will all be over soon. Trivial arguments with his wife somehow fit seamlessly along what-does-it-all-mean yearnings of a life that could've held more. And the whole array of sorrow, resignation and instant humility is conveyed in a single sentence: "So this is how you died, in whispers that you did not hear."