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The Snows of Kilimanjaro Summary. Next. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” Stranded on safari in the African plains, Harry apologizes to his wife Helen for the stench of the gangrene eating its way up his leg. The two of them watch the carrion birds that have encircled the camp, waiting for his death.
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Summary. Harry, a writer, and his wife, Helen, are stranded while on safari in Africa. A bearing burned out on their truck, and Harry is talking about the gangrene that has infected his leg when he did not apply iodine after he scratched it.
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As the story opens, the speaker, later identified as Harry, is proclaiming that something is painless. It soon reveals that Harry and his wife, Helen, are encamped somewhere near Mount Kilimanjaro, which, at nearly twenty thousand feet, is Africas highest mountain. An epigraph at the beginning of the story, before the action is under way, describes...
Throughout the story, Harry vacillates between consciousness and unconsciousness. His conscious periods become shorter and shorter. Unconsciousness reveries of his past fill his mind and reveal a great deal about his past. The passages during the unconscious state are printed in italics except for the one very near the end in which Harry hallucinat...
As it turns out, Harrys illusion of the plane is just that: an illusion. In the end, Helen has Harrys cot carried into their tent. Before long, she tries to rouse him but cannot. She becomes aware that his breathing has stopped, just as a hyena, a carnivore that feeds on dead animals, howls outside their tent.
Reminiscent of Ambrose Bierces An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1891), The Snows of Kilimanjaro tells of a writer, Harry, who faces almost immediate death in Africa from gangrene. A rescue plane is to fly in and rescue him, but his prognosis is grave. In the story, the great, white, hovering plane arrives, sparkling in the bright sun.
The fact is that the plane does not arrive. What the reader is told is Harrys final dream. His wife, Helen, comes into the bedroom and finds him dead. The story is important in the Hemingway canon because, like A Farewell to Arms and others of his works, it contrasts the mountain (purity) to the plain (corruption). Harry spends the last afternoon o...
In his prefatory paragraph, Hemingway describes and situates Kenyas Mount Kilimanjaroat 19,710 feet the highest mountain in Africa. He reveals that close to its summit is the desiccated, frozen carcass of a leopard, whose presence at that altitude is a mystery. In sharp contrast to the pure, cold mountaintop and noble leopard are the overheated pla...
Hemingway places Harry on an acme artistically but shows him being devoured by those for whom he writesor, perhaps, like the hyena in Hemingways The Green Hills of Africa, he is self-devouring. Certainly like Belmonte, the bullfighter in The Sun Also Rises, he is exceptionally talented but appalled by his audience, represented in the story by Helen...
Summary. Dying in Africa. An opening epigraph describes Mt. Kilimanjaro's stature and significance in Africa as the "House of God." It also describes a native legend about the mysterious presence of a leopard's frozen carcass near its summit.
Summary. An aging writer named Harry is dying of gangrene in the African savannah after their truck burnt out and stranded them at camp. Although his wife Helen reassures him that help is coming, Harry is irritable and argumentative about his impending death, which upsets her.
