Snows of Kilimanjaro

In Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro we see a writer who is lying in bed dying of gangrene. However, the real death is of the artist the writer could have become had not his talent been wasted through abuse and disease. A multitude of times we see Harry lashing himself for letting his artistic integrity literally and figuratively rot away. In order to convey the anguish of the writer as he contemplates death, a physical presence that may well be another character in the story as personified by Hemingway, the author uses a narrative technique that is modern. It is an experimental technique of multiple perspectives. While the narration in the short story is mainly limited omniscience, it is broader than this because of the use of alternating dialogue, interior monologue, and interior flashback with only sparse use of objective narration.

As Harry accepts his fatal condition and the ever more palpable presence of death, we first see him accuse himself of wasting his talent "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" (Hemingway 60). However, Harry is conscious that he is a talented writer and that his talent has not left him completely. Instead, something bigger than Harry's abuse of his talent has come along, death.

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