Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Genre: Novel, short story, newspaper articles
Movement: Lost Generation
Awards:
1. Pulitzer Prize for Literature (1953)
2. Nobel Prize for Literature (1954)
Major Works:
1. The Old Man and the Sea
2. The Sun Also Rises
3. A Farewell to Arms
4. For Whom the Bell Tolls
5. In Our Time
Influenced: His work gave rise to the
minimalist movement in American fiction
If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is
writing about he may omit things that he knows
and the reader, if the writer is writing truly
enough, will have a feeling of those things as
strongly as though the writer had stated them.
The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to
only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer
who omits things because he does not know them
only makes hollow places in his writing.
Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon
Lost Generation: Literary Context
The term Lost Generation is used to describe the generation of writers
active immediately after World War I. Gertrude Stein used the phrase in
conversation with Ernest Hemingway, supposedly quoting a garage
mechanic saying to her, "You are all a lost generation." The phrase signifies
a disillusioned postwar generation characterized by lost values, lost belief
in the idea of human progress, and a mood of futility and despair leading
to hedonism. The mood is described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of
Paradise when he writes of a generation that found "all Gods dead, all
wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."

"Lost generation" usually refers specifically to the American expatriate
writers associated with 1920s Paris, especially Hemingway and Fitzgerald,
and to a lesser extent T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Hemingway used the
phrase "You are all a lost generation" as the epigraph to his first novel, The
Sun Also Rises, and the influential critic Malcolm Cowley used "lost
generation" in various studies of expatriate writers.


Lost Generation: Historical Context
World War I
The first World War was a traumatic experience for Europe and America,
for although it was fought largely in Europe, it involved almost every
European nation and, at the time, the European nations controlled vast
areas of Africa and Asia. The war was remarkable for the sheer mass of
killing it entailed. New technologies of war, including motorized vehicles,
airplanes, and poison gas, were used for the first time. Probably most
traumatic and senseless was the strategy of trench warfare, utilized largely
in France and Belgium, in which each army dug a trench in the ground and
attempted to advance to overtake the opposing armys trench by waves of
soldiers going over the top. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died in
these waves, but trench warfare only brought the war to a bloody
standstill.
Hemingway saw action in World War I as an ambulance driver and was
wounded.


Lost Generation: Historical Context (cont.)
Africa
Kenya, where Mount Kilimanjaro is located, was a popular destination for
adventurous American and European tourists during the time between the
two world wars.
Europe
During the 1920s, Hemingway and the rest of the Lost Generation
wandered around Europe, drank, spent time together, and produced some
of the greatest art and literature of the 20th century. Many of this group
were aimless, dissatisfied with their home countries, and refused to
assimilate into the European culture.



Time Afternoon until night that same day; between WW1 and WW2
Place Safari camp on the plains of Tanganyika (Tanzania)
Mood Attempted detachment
Tone Reminiscent; futility; regretful
Conflict
External Conflict
Man vs. Man (Woman) Harry believes that the women in his life
have kept him from achieving artistic success as a writer.
Internal Conflict
Man vs. Himself Harry struggles to come to terms with his own death.
Characters
Compton
Compton flies the plane that is meant to take Harry back to the city to
save his life. He is confident and tries to make Harry feel better about his
predicament. However, he exists only in Harrys dream.
Harry
Harry is the protagonist of the story. He is a writer and has had many
experiences in Europe. He also very much enjoys big-game hunting. When
the story begins, Harry is suffering from gangrene in his leg and he is dying
in the African backcountry while waiting for a plane to take him to the city.
Helen
Helen, a major character, is Harrys wife. Also known as The Wife, she
remains unnamed until the end of the story when a delirious Harry refers
to her by her name as he dies. He does not seem to love her, but he does
respect her to a certain degree for her skill with a gun. She comes from
Characters (cont.)
Helen (cont.)
a wealthy family, and Harry has contempt for that. However, Helen cares
for him greatly and tries to ease his suffering.
Molo
Molo, a minor character, is the African servant who serves Harry and
Helen. He does little more in the story than bring Harry whiskey and
sodas.

Style: Flashbacks
The story is divided between six present-time sections (set in regular type)
and flashbacks (set in italics). In the present-time sections, the protagonist
is facing his death stoically, quietly, and with a great deal of machismo. All
he needs is whiskey and soda to accept his imminent death. However, in
the flashback sections, Harry faces his life. His flashbacks show the reader
that he has had an exciting and well-travelled life but that he is also
haunted by his memories of World War I. He served in the U.S. Army in
that war and saw combat on the Eastern front, in the Balkans, and Austria.
The violence and death that he saw there come back to him as his rotting
leg tells him that he is about to die. Harrys past is not all negative,
however. He is a writer, and in his flashbacks he thinks about his vocation
and about all of the stories he wanted to write that he never took the time
to begin. He has spent time in Paris with the artists and writers who lived
there in the 1920s (one name he mentions, Tristan Tzara, is a real poet of
the time and another, Julian, is a thinly-disguised portrait of the
Style: Flashbacks (cont.)
American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald) and is familiar with the Place de la
Contrescarpe, a popular bohemian locale of the time. His flashbacks also
show that he is an experienced outdoorsman necessary background to
this character so that readers do not think of him as a greenhorn who is
dying out of pure inexperience.
The flashbacks center around concerns about the erosion of values: lost
love, loose sex, drinking, revenge, and war. They are a mix of hedonism,
sentimentality toward the human condition, and leaving unfinished
business.
Style: Point of View
In The Snows of Kilimanjaro, the matters that trouble Harry are made
clear to the reader; the narrator, who is inside Harrys head, speaks of
them explicitly. However, Hemingway sets these instances of introspection
apart, dividing them into sections printed in italics. In all but one of the
sections that are in regular type, the narration is typical Hemingway:
blunt, unadorned, almost devoid of adjectives, and quite uninformative as
to what Harry is feeling. The sentences are short and declarative.
Nevertheless, when the narration drifts into the italic sections, the tone
changes. The sentences grow longer and almost stream-of-consciousness,
with one clause tacked on after another recording the protagonists
impression of a scene. The narrator describes scenes fondly and vividly,
and uses metaphors and figurative language: the snow as smooth to see
as cake frosting, for instance.
Style: Point of View (cont.)
As the story proceeds and Harrys condition worsens, the switching
between unadorned narration and impressionistic, memory-laden
narration becomes quicker and more frequent, until the penultimate
section. In this section the section in which Compton arrives and takes
Harry away the reader thinks they are in the real world until the end,
when they realize that Harry is having another dream sequence. This time,
however, the dreamusually delineated by italicshas bled through to
the real world, and the only clue, before the end of the dream, that it is
a dream is the sentence structure. In this section, the sentences are
longer, more impressionistic, more descriptive, just as the sentences in the
earlier italic dream segments were. The contrast between the real
world, in which Harrys gangrene has killed him, and the dream world, in
which he is flying toward the unbelievably white peak of Mount
Kilimanjaro, is accentuated in the final section, in which the narrator
returns to his short, declarative sentences.
Style: Allusion
The Snows of Kilimanjaro alludes subtly to two well-known short
stories: one by its structure and technique, the other by its subject matter.
The first story is An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1891) by the
American writer Ambrose Bierce. In this story, set during the Civil War, an
Alabama man is being hanged on Owl Creek Bridge for espionage. As the
story opens, readers see him on the bridge, having the noose put over his
head. When the boards under his feet are snatched away, the rope breaks.
He is able to use his bound hands to take the rope off his neck and swim
away down the river as the Union soldiers bullets hit the water by him.
After swimming down the river a long way, he gets out and finds his way
back home. As he arrives at his house and as his wife stretches her arms to
greet him, the noose jerks at his neck and he dies instantly. The whole
story has been an imaginary scene that the protagonist has lived through
from the time he begins falling to the time that the ropes slack runs out.
Just like in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, the seeming salvation for the hero
existed only in the heros mind.
Style: Allusion (cont.)
Hemingways story also alludes to another well-known story, Henry James
The Middle Years (1893). Like Hemingway, James presents a self-portrait
of a writer near the end of his life. James Dencombe, like Hemingways
Harry, has an admirer. However, in the case of Dencombe, the admirer is
male, not a wife as in the case of Henry. This admirer gives up something
important and valuable to be with the writer. Finally, like Harry, Dencombe
dies somewhat unexpectedly and ironically at the end of the story.
Style: Foreshadowing
The hyena It foreshadows the death of the protagonist.
Vultures - They foreshadow the death of the protagonist.
The leopards skeleton - It foreshadows the death of the protagonist.

Symbolism
The leopard It is a symbol of immortality, a reward for taking the difficult
road. Harry himself was a "leopard" at certain times in his life. Specifically,
Harry can be seen as a leopard during:
1. His youth, when he lived in a poor neighborhood of Paris as a writer
2. In the war, when he gave his last morphine pills for himself to the
horribly suffering Williamson
3. On his deathbed, when he mentally composes flashbacks and uses his
intention to write
4. When he stays loyal to his wife and does not confess to her that he never
really loved her
The hyena It is a symbol of the rotting death that Harry fears.
1. Approaching death
2. The emptiness with which Harry associates the sign of death
3. On his deathbed, when he mentally composes flashbacks and uses his
intention to write
4. Death is about to reach Harry
Symbolism (cont.)
Mount Kilimanjaro It is a triple symbol.
1. Immortality In most civilizations, God's promise of immortality
resides on the highest mountain top: Mount Olympus for the Greeks
and Mount Fuji for the Japanese.
2. Truth, idealism, purity
The plains They symbolize evil and confusion.
The poetry Harry never wrote This symbolizes Harrys belief that he has
not accomplished what he set out to do as a young man. (Im full of
poetry now. Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry.)
Alcohol It symbolizes two things.
1. Goodwill, friendship, accomplishment (flashbacks)
2. Self-destruction for Harry


Themes
Death Mans spirit can triumph despite death. (Three deeds during
Harrys life make this possible:
1. Giving away his last morphine pills that he saved for himself to his
friend Williamson, who is in horrendous pain
2. Harry's intention to write (the mental writing of the flashbacks) in his
painful stupor
3. Sacrificing himself to his wife as opposed to absolving himself)
Artistic creation Harrys failure to achieve the artistic success as a writer
that he sought in life is one of the major themes. He became what he
despised. (Harry comes close to representing Hemingway himself.)