For example, in the first sentence – “WELL, here we are, and if you cast your eye over the room you will see that Tubes and trams and omnibuses, private carriages not a few, even, I venture to believe, landaus with bays in them, have been busy at it, weaving threads from one end of London” – the author begins without making clear what she is talking about and does not finish her idea. We can see in this short story that there is not a linear thought to follow, and thus it is very difficult to understand what it is about. Her words are “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight and incident scores upon consciousness.”(Muller, 318). As an impressionist writer, Woolf tries to “retain the impressions that an object makes on her”(Aguirre, 8) in this case, she is trying to capture a moment, a concert of music by Mozart, but through her conscience and by evoking whatever comes to her mind during that moment. Virgina Woolf is well known for her obscure narrative style, which is clearly exemplified in “The String Quartet” by means of sensory impressions, stream of consciousness, discontinuity, and minimising of plot. For Harry, reaching the top of the mountain means fulfilling his works as an artist and recovering his lost morality, or as I mentioned before, it means Harry’s spiritual re birth, because achieving his ideals secures his access to heaven. Finally, the summit of the mountain symbolises the doors of heaven, peace, and perfection. Now that he is short of time, he sees the snows of Kilimanjaro as a symbol of oblivion. The snow is a recurrent image in Harry’s first flashback: “That was one of the things he had saved to write, with, in the morning at breakfast, looking out the window and seeing snow on the mountains in Bulgaria and Nansen’s Secretary asking the old man if it were snow.” Snow was always associated with episodes in his life that meant the loss of opportunities to write, opportunities for artistic expression. Other symbols are the snow and the summit of Kilimanjaro, which are closely related to each other. These birds of prey are commonly related to death since they are carrion eaters in the same way, the presence of the hyena in this story is related to Harry’s spiritual death and personality: living upon others.
The next symbols are the vultures that fly “obscenely” around their heads because of Harry’s rotten leg. From the beginning we are faced with one of the most important symbols in the story, the frozen carcass of a leopard, which represents all the ideals that Harry has never been able to achieve. Hemingway uses simple and clear words and sentence structures, but he transmits meanings through symbols. Having married a wealthy woman without loving her is what caused Harry’s spiritual death and now that his physical death is near, he tries to make up for all those opportunities that he has lost. He is a failed artist, who procrastinated writing because he was too lazy, and has exchanged his artistic talent for luxury, money, and comfort. The Snows of Kilmanjaro is the narration of the last days of a dying author, Harry, in a camp near the edge of the Tanganyika plains country. The theme in this short story is an ethical one in the words of Carlos Baker, the story deals with “the achievements and loss of moral manhood” (Weeks 118), or spiritual death and rebirth.
#Hemingway essay grader plus#
the snow, the summit, the carrion eaters, and the leopard) and by the use of the third person omnipresent narrative device, plus the insertion of dialogues and flashbacks. In ”The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Ernest Hemingway’s style is marked by his use of symbols of associations, (e.g.
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