The snows of kilimangiaro

THE SNOWS OF KILIMANGIARO

Author : Ernest Hemingway

Literary category : short stories

Author's life: Hemingway was born at Oak Park, in Illinois, in 1899; he studied in his home town, where he graduated in 1917 and began a career as journalist for 'Kansas City Star' .When World War I broke out, Ernest volunteered for Red Cross, and during the war was also wounded with a bullet splinter.Then, when he came back to Chicago,he  started writing some stories, among which we remember 'The old man and the sea', 'The 49 short stories', 'The short happy life of Francis Macomber' and 'The snows of Kilimangiaro'.Emingway was one of the leading exponent of the 'lost generation', devoid of those moral certainties that before the war had semeed unshakable. In 1953 he received the Pulitzer Prize for 'The old man and the sea' and the year after was bestowed with the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In 1961 he was found dead in his own house, killed by his shootgun, and no one still knows if he committed sucide or it was only an unintentional accident.

THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF FRANCIS MACOMBER

Characters : Francis Macomber, the main character, Margaret Macomber, his wife, and Robert Wilson, a hunter.

Summary : With this short story Hemingway wants us to understand how a  miserable and sad life, as Francis Macomber's, can become happy.

Macomber lives indeed a very unhappy life: he is loved by his wife Margaret only for his money, and everybody thinks he's a coward; during a safari he runs away in front of a lion, and it makes increase the contempt of Margaret and Rober Wilson, the hunter who was with him during the shoot; this character represents somehow Hemingway's thought and for this reason  Wilson's remarks are very often citeed.

Macomber wants to reedem himself, so he and Mr Wilson go hunting bufalos,finally he dares to kill a wild animal and makes his character mature, so the wife, afraid of a possible abandonment, kills her husband, giving the story a dramatic end.

Both Macomber and Wilson are dinamic characters, because they change their own way of thinking during the narration.

Margaret is instead the only character who never changes her thought and can be seen like an 'anti-heroine', and her malice gets worse and worse, and ends with the murder of the husband.

The vocabulary is quite easy and coodinate clauses are preferred to complicated sentences.

2) THE SNOWS OF KILIMANGIARO

Characters : Harry, a failure journalist, who is the main character, and his wife, Helen.

Summary : Harry is a journalist, who preferred the comforts of a gracious life to his job; he gave up to the troubles and is supported only by the money of his wife, who he does not even love.

During a hike on the Kilimangiaro Harry hurts himself, but considering the wound a footling wound, he does not treat it; so that scratch becomes an infection, and then turn gangrenous, and when the narration starts Harry is going to die.

His wife always stays close to him and try to help him, but he repays her courtesy with abuses. Harry is sure to die, but he's got no scare, and his biggest worry is to be able to live death like any adventure of his life, without losing any feeling of it.

The end of the story is quite convoluted: it seems that Harry manage to save himself, when a plane arrives and takes him to the nearest hospital, but soon afterwards Helen wakes up in the night and finds Harry dead on his cot, with the leg dangling.

The narration is often interrupted with many long flashbacks which describe Harry's previous life, like in 'The short happy life of Francis Macomber'; the two stories are very similar: both end with the death of the protagonist and both are written in a simple style.

3) OLD MAN AT THE BRIDGE

Characters : an old man and a soldier.

Summary : A soldier saw an old man sat by a side of a bridge; the World War II was raging in the whole Europe, but the old man seemed not to worry about it nor about the air raids; he only  worried to have left his animals alone because of the artillery, and not to be able to come back home to take care of them.

This tale is very short and easy, but is also a token story about the cruelty of the war.