“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” Summary & Analysis

Hemingway begins right in the middle of the action with little context. That he withholds the characters’ names and the details of their situation echoes their sense of powerlessness. Slowly, the facts emerge: the circling scavenger birds indicate the presence of death, while the reference to the broken-down truck reveals that the characters are stranded in the wilderness. One thing Hemingway does disclose about the characters themselves is that the man is a writer— a fact divulged even before his name, highlighting its central role in his identity.

Helen’s reasonableness contrasts with Harry’s antagonism as they quarrel. Helen chooses optimism in an attempt to calm and encourage them both, despite her nervousness and his defeatism. She also remains focused on possible solutions, even though actual ideas currently remain lacking. Meanwhile, Harry seems concerned only with how to pass the time, choosing to bicker instead of thinking positively or living his final hours with forgiveness and acceptance. Beyond indicating that they are very familiar with each other, this dynamic establishes their personal dispositions: Helen is caring and sensible, while Harry is argumentative and petulant.

Here, the nature of their predicament becomes clearer: Harry is nearing death, although it remains uncertain exactly how. Harry is resigned to his fate and, given the presence of the scavenger birds, it seems he has some reason to be; death hangs in the air above them, reflected physically in the form of the birds. The description of the bush clarifies the setting of the story in the plains of Africa, in a camp offering relative comfort. During this round of arguing, Helen also uses Harry’s name for the first time, giving the reader further details about this dying writer. The pair are on holiday, it appears, and Harry ordering a drink from an African servant suggests they are financially comfortable. This gradual but steady stream of information reassures the reader all will be told in due course, establishing the narrative style and flow of the remainder of the story.

Harry is fatalistic, accepting his inevitable end. It is not the nature of his death that concerns him now, but simply the fact that he has run out of time. He is unsatisfied with his life, having never written about his many experiences. This seems at odds with his assertion he had been obsessed with death for years and raises the unwritten question of why, if he had been so concerned about the end, he didn’t begin writing long ago. The indecisive wording of his reflections, meanwhile, suggests he never had a serious push to consciously consider why he was not writing earlier, and betray a nagging fear that his procrastination may really have been a guise for a lack of talent. These new, incomplete lines of thinking crop up when death is closer than ever, leaving this question of why he has failed in his calling without a satisfactory answer.

Harry’s aggression toward Helen’s money begins to explain his ill-disposed demeanor toward his wife. Her protestation that she has shared her life and wealth with him contrasts her generosity with his petulance, characterizing him as a spoiled child. This also shows they have lived a life of comfort in Europe, placing them high on the social hierarchy.

The strange, strained relationship between Harry and Helen plays out as he goads her, mocking her rhetorical question with direct answers. Despite Harry’s intentionally hurtful words, Helen remains calm and rational, reasoning that he is ill and cannot mean what he says. Helen comes across in this exchange as a sensible and clear-headed woman who loves her husband. Harry’s constant references to her money indicate his sense of inferiority that taint his view and treatment of her. He is not naturally one of her “people,” creating distance between the couple on account of his insecurities.  

In the first of many series of flashbacks, Harry recalls memories relating to his experiences around World War I, which took place from 1912-14. Thrace is an area in Europe that is now spilt between Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey. After the war and the changing of borders as agreed upon in the Armistice, Fridtjof Nansen was a key figure in the movement of peoples across these new borders. Harry overheard his fateful miscalculation of the safety of the mountain passage while riding the Orient Express, a glamorous railway that traveled across Europe, showing he lived in close proximity to key decision-makers at the time. The Gauertal valley lies in Austria, where the war still loomed over Harry's life, as a deserting soldier wanders across his peaceful mountainside hermitage. Harry speaks with familiarity of Schrunz, in the tiny European principality of Liechtenstein, and the variety of his travels demonstrate his diverse life experiences—experiences that Harry never got around to writing about.

These recollections reveal that Harry saw many terrible events during his time at the front, which blurred the idea of right and wrong—a phenomenon that strongly influenced the Modernist movement in art and literature. People on Harry’s own side, this moment makes clear, committed unthinkable acts, and after the war Harry even socialized with people who were once his enemy (although none of them were truly the same people as they were before the war started). Alongside the horrors of war lies Harry’s nostalgia for leisure time spent in Europe, drinking too much and singing rousing songs while skiing. The stark contrast shows how on the one hand Harry had the worst experiences of his life in Europe, but one the other he also had some of his best. To him, these are all worth writing about—the pain alongside the joy. Again, though, he never wrote about any of it.

Fresh from mulling over the blurred lines between good and evil, right and wrong, Harry questions the nature of love. He suggests lovers are merely performers—an insight into his own mercenary approach to romance. Helen reminds him of her feelings by once again trying to bring him back to reason. Turning the argument back to her money via a tenuous link, Harry shows he is only concerned with licking his own wounds. They cannot make love to pass the time, so he chooses to quarrel instead. His selfish approach evidences his dismissive view of the other sex. Referring to Helen's money as his protection underlines Harry’s insecurity on this point, suggesting he feels emasculated because he relies on her wealth.

Harry does not love his wife but has used her for her money. The social norms of the time stipulated Harry ought to provide for his wife, but the opposite is true in this relationship. This causes him embarrassment, which he deflects into contempt directed at Helen, whom he characterizes as the source of his shame. The strength of his cruelty to Helen reflects the depth of his inner anguish at his inability to provide for himself. Just as Harry’s cruel words say more about him than Helen, his insecurity says more about the social framework of the time than his own mental strength. Although Hemingway does not directly argue this point, his characters’ relationship reflects the perspective of the wider society from which Hemingway wrote. Gender roles and expectations were restrictive and inflexible, causing pain where there could be love. Helen, a good woman, loves and cares for her husband, but he cannot accept and reciprocate her love freely due to his sense of financial—and, as such, masculine—inadequacy.

The fact that more birds gather and Harry unwittingly falls asleep bodes ill. Death lingers on the edges of the narrative. Helen, meanwhile, remains hopeful and continues with her day-to-day activities, albeit with respect to Harry’s peaceful repose. She remains a positive figure—optimistic, pragmatic, and independent. Harry’s attacks on her seem to be even greater evidence against his view of her and the social pressures on their marriage. Sensing this himself, Harry’s thoughts turn inward toward his own failings. Here Hemingway presents Harry as an emasculated figure, as he disdains himself for his leech-like lifestyle. In contrast to the harsher memories in Harry’s earlier flashbacks, his life among these wealthy people, however comfortable, has been unproductive. High society provides no writing prompts, and worse yet, has attacked his drive to write at all. Comfort has undermined his calling, while hardship had fostered it.

Through Harry’s failure and regret, Hemingway demonstrates how writers who turn away from their calling cannot blame their chosen distractions—in Harry’s case, the comforts of being a kept man—as an excuse. Hemingway sets high standards for men of talent, condemning Harry for wasting his; talent is something to be deployed purposefully and meaningfully, not traded for prosperity. Harry speaks mockingly of his relationships with a series of rich women, and his scorn reveals both the transactional view he takes of the, and, on a deeper level, his disgust at this mercenary approach.

Giving Helen a more detailed background, Hemingway paints her as a well-rounded character with her own motivations and interests. Harry’s scorn for her reflects badly on him, and Helen’s loyalty to Harry is laudable. Death once again hangs over the text, this time in Helen’s past. Unlike Harry’s response to similar experiences, however, in the face of loss and an awareness that death could come at any time, Helen set out to create a new life for herself. Harry, meanwhile, depended on others to provide a life of comfort, aiming simply to pass the time. Hemingway focuses here on Harry’s betrayal of his calling: he traded away his talent to secure his comfort. Helen and her money have been simply vehicles to aid that transition.

Having settled on blaming himself for his own inadequacies, Harry can now treat Helen with the courtesy she has shown she deserves. Despite his treatment of her earlier, she still seeks to care and provide for him, hunting meat for a broth to strengthen him and voicing both concern and optimism. She makes herself vulnerable to Harry by expressing her fear of being “destroyed,” which he playfully turns into a well-received sexual advance. Helen’s approval and reciprocal responses suit a happily married couple’s exchange, as Hemingway presents his view of a healthy romantic interaction—losing (destroying) themselves in each other.

The presence of the hyena, a scavenging beast, brings the narrative focus back onto the ever-looming presence of death. Although Harry and Helen are on better terms, he remains on his fatal trajectory, the contrast clearest when an ominous foreboding interrupts Harry’s admiration of his wife. The hyena’s presence in his image of the void cements the creature’s role as a symbol of death in the story. Harry’s perception of death, meanwhile, reveals the nature of his fear. He does not fear pain, and in fact has none. Rather, the bleak unknown prompts his dread. Harry’s time is nearly up, and he fears dying without success, as a nobody, with no chance to make it right. In this way, Hemingway uses Harry’s regret as an example for all artists of talent, suggesting that they must make the most of the time given them while they still can.

As he weakens, Harry begins to fall into longer and more frequent flashbacks. In this section, sentences run together to create a breathless, rushing narrative as Hemingway pulls the reader into the middle of Harry’s frenzied, dramatic encounters. The strength of his memories overwhelms him as his desperation to write them becomes more urgent. Here, the reader sees another motivation behind his dismissive treatment of women: beyond seeking their money, he has used women to heal himself of past wounds, albeit unsuccessfully.

Death returns to the story, this time in the faceless, massive losses of war. The horror of the scenes drove grown, worldly men to cry like children. The fact one instance involves friendly fire underlines the pointlessness of this loss. The ballet skirts and pompoms refer to the uniforms of Greek soldiers, lying dead on the ground as the Turkish forces advanced. The officers randomly executed deserting soldiers, shooting into the fleeing masses, although in the face of their own certain death they themselves joined the retreating horde. That Harry highlights the Greek uniforms as ridiculous mirrors the grotesque comedy of their deaths, while the officers’ failed attempts to stem the retreat further shows the pointlessness of all the violence. This chaos and terror contrasts starkly with the poet Harry later sees at a cafe in Paris discussing literary theory. Writers, Hemingway argues, need to be on the ground, living in the middle of the action and hardship to understand the meaningful realities of the world. Sitting comfortably in a cafe leads to creative impotence.

Having seen Harry bait Helen into quarreling despite her determination not to humor him, the reader takes Harry’s rhetorical question with a pinch of salt. An imperfect narrator, Harry does not provide an objective view of his relationships. As Harry approaches his final moments, the memories that overwhelm him are those he had saved up to write down. He recollects the meaningful chapters of his life, rather than any of the time spent amid high society. He sees these as not only worth writing about, but his “duty” to write about. Hemingway expands the directive he provides for writers of talent: to follow and commit to their calling as an obligation. Harry’s laziness is a moral failure, then, and a warning.

Death is a stench in the air, a future reality plaguing the couple’s thoughts, and a physical presence as Harry’s condition deteriorates. The gangrene progressing up his leg heralds his soon departure, as well as the closing door on his opportunity to achieve his calling. Helen remains pragmatic, offering broth and positivity, although Harry is a reluctant recipient of both. Her insistence paints Helen as independently minded, while Harry’s obedience despite his pessimism shows his reformed approach to his marriage. Yet this cannot save him from the reality of his situation, as death again makes itself known to its next victim.

Perceiving tonight will be his last, Harry decides to sleep under the stars, perhaps planning to gaze upon the void to prepare himself for that other abyss. A worldly man, Harry does not want to spoil the one experience he has never had himself. Death has been presence throughout his life, but he has learned its lessons too late. Now, he has run out of time to write, though—in phrasing reminiscent of Hemingway’s own writing philosophy—Harry feels he could fit it all into one well-written paragraph; Hemingway often said that starting with “one true sentence” would provide the momentum for the rest of the work. Harry expands that idea, suggesting that all of his truth could be captured in a paragraph, “if only he could get it right.” The implication is that one paragraph capturing the essence of existence is the writer’s ultimate, perhaps unattainable aim, though Harry certainly cannot achieve that within the few hours he has left. 

Harry casts his mind back to idyllic mountainside scenes, but even here death and destruction are present. Harry’s grandfather’s loyalty to his melted guns reflects his sense of loss, leaving their remains in the ashes as a memorial to his burned down house. Life and circumstances are always temporary, a lesson Harry has not acted on in good time. The beauty of the Black Forest in southwest Germany cannot protect the hotel owner, whom economic forces overwhelm, driving him to suicide. These stories of people’s vulnerability and suffering are placed at odds with Harry’s unproductive life of comfort, which has led to his betrayal of those people whose stories he believes he had the duty to write.

Harry feels he cannot dictate the poverty of the Parisian slums, but actually being there, in the midst of it, had given him the power and focus to write. Again, Hemingway emphasizes that writers must be personally familiar with their topic—including its people and the locations—to truly capture them in writing. Harry’s detailed memories come in quick succession as he rushes to remember all the details while he still can; unable to write them now, he seeks at least to remember. Once again death is present even in his memories, reflected in the massacre of communists in the slums. Here the killing was largely indiscriminate, further reflecting the unpredictability of death.

Although Harry cannot feel death’s physical presence at this moment, its menacing influence lingers and he bides his time until it comes to collect him. He feels he is becoming more intimately acquainted with death now that he knows it is on his trail, beginning to imagine its specific shape and habits. Helen, though meaning well in her care for Harry, distracts him from his more urgent task of “writing,” in his mind, the memories he is desperate to save. He views Helen as an impediment, one he would rather be rid of.

Harry sees the Paris he cares about as separate and distinct from the one that he later inhabited with his rich wives. Immediately returning there, to “that Paris,” after only a brief exchange in the present demonstrates how his memories are overpowering him, physically and mentally. His regret that he has not written these stories essentially paralyses him, gripping his consciousness. The story of the boy on the ranch yet again brings death to the fore, as Harry’s physical familiarity with its grim realities underlines his overdue realization of his own mortality.

Harry's memories hold him in their grasp as he cannot concretely separate his internal musings from the present, leading to a confused exchange with Helen. His contempt of the rich comes from experience, as his attempt to participate in their lifestyle and find something to write about has left his writing career in tatters. Harry scorns other writers who viewed them with “romantic awe.” The reference here often considered to be to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who began a story with a similar opening line. Harry’s scorn is hypocritical, given he abandoned his own calling as a writer to pursue a life of comfort from the rich. Although he might not have been “wrecked” like Julian, his life of leisure came at the cost of his talent. He distances himself from such psychological pain by not caring, and so the only aspect of death he fears has been physical pain. But even in death he remains in relative comfort, with no pain coming from the infection.

Falling sleepily back into another flashback, weakened by his infection and rushing memories, Harry recalls a grisly death he witnessed that contrasts his own painless passing. Hemingway shows the grim reality of death close up here. Harry is intimately acquainted with human fragility, as well as the fact that life, or perhaps death, can portion out suffering beyond a man’s capacity to handle. This throws into sharp relief the excuses Harry had made for his failures earlier, as well as the blame he had apportioned to others; he has long known the horrors of death, which have obsessed him for years, yet he did not act on those insights and write his experiences in due time.

Harry feels alone in the world because he has left the life with which he felt truly connected. His wife, though he admits her personal merit, is not part of a lifestyle that he feels has empowered him or his talent. Instead he has moved in high society circles but found they have sapped his talent, and now that the party is over he is left only with his wife, or “hostess,” who invited him. Harry's disparaging view of his wife's role in his life again underlines his transactional view of women, that she provides a service for his convenience, opening doors for him into higher echelons of society. Again, his perspective arises from his insecure sense of masculinity, as he depends on her, in what is a role reversal for the time, which implicitly suggests the limitations of those roles in the first place. The presence of the hyena, meanwhile, brings Harry’s approaching death back into focus, and soon after he feels death come by again. Hemingway characterizes death as predatory, and Harry himself is the prey. Harry tells Helen he has been writing, although of course he has not moved from his cot. For him, reliving his varied life experiences is a desperate attempt to symbolically preserve them, even if he is the only reader.

Death takes on its most physically present form as it finally approaches and weighs heavily on Harry. Working up from the foot of his cot and settling onto his chest, the reader understands that it is the progress of the gangrene eating at him from the inside out. From Harry’s perspective, though, he has weakened enough for death to move against its prey, much as the nearby hyena only eats carrion or dying animals. After following him for much of his life, across continents and peoples, death has finally taken him for its own. Hemingway shows that death comes for all men, in the end, and the time and manner cannot be anticipated. As such, it is imperative to live a full life, particularly for writers or artists with the duty to represent those experiences.

Although not italicized like the other imagined or remembered scenes (in order to delay the climax), this scene takes place exclusively within Harry’s mind. Given Harry has produced this alternative ending to his own story, it provides an insight into the manner of death he would prefer. First, he is remembered: his friend Compton makes it to him in good time to save him. Harry believes he has not stayed too long at the party, having lost track of his friends, after all. This reveals a core desire only hinted at by his previous, deflected frustrations: the desire to belong to a people that value him. Second, his final resting place on the highest mountain in Africa gives him an honorable ending worthy of remembering. Although he has not written down his life experiences for posterity, such a prestigious gravesite leaves a notable mark to commemorate a life well-lived.. Harry’s passing is bittersweet, as he believes he has been and will be remembered, though in reality this is not necessarily the case. But Hemingway does not condemn him for these aspirations. Rather, Harry’s failure to secure this manner of passing is a warning to others squandering their talent and wasting their lives, which can end in a moment.

Hemingway brings us back into the present this time by focusing on Hele —this fact alone indicates the truth of Harry’s fate to the reader. She is dreaming of her own past and family, and of social situations a world away from those that plagued Harry’s dreams. The hyena’s call awakens her to reality, the one in which Compton did not make it in time to save Harry. She panics, not as familiar with death as Harry had been, and sensibly calls for help. But it is too late; it had long been too late for Harry. The hyena’s “strange, human, almost crying” call seems to lament and confirm Harry’s passing, as death finally has Harry in its grasp.