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Coming to terms with regrets and difficult memories
From the beginning of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” one thing is clear: Harry is unhappy with his life and wants to finally be honest about his misery. Harry has been living a lie, pretending to love his partner and sleepwalking through a shallow life of travel and adventure while secretly yearning for the hardship and freedom of his youth. This life is a mistake, which is evidenced by the fact that he has lost his motivation to write. However, Harry’s gangrenous wound presents a serious problem: while he can finally admit that he has not been making the right choices in his life, he likely will not have the chance to turn things around. His fast-approaching death forces Harry to come to terms with his honest feelings about his life.
Harry reflects on his marriage to Helen. Although he has some affection for her, he does not truly love her, and partly blames her for the death of his writing ability. In contrast, Harry did actually love his previous wives, but realizes that he destroyed those marriages by loving too intensely and demanding too much. Worn out and broken, he entered a relationship with Helen which involved no love or demands. Harry also reflects on why he never wrote the stories he always meant to write. He believes that his luxurious lifestyle has made his soul grow “fat,” and that he no longer has the emotional capacity or vigor to confront the complicated and often painful memories that he wanted to write about. Admitting where he went wrong is important for Harry’s process of acceptance before death, and it may even allow him to find salvation and purity after death.
The human urge to share stories
For Harry, the need to write is a pivotal part of his identity. He’s a talented writer and has the ability to write about the human condition in an original, masterful way. Additionally, he has many profound memories that deserve to be reflected upon and recorded. However, the need to write stories is also a universal one. Storytelling is seen across cultures as a method of achieving immortality, a vehicle for people or communities to leave legacies and pass down memories, and a duty that involves adding one’s individual voice to the tapestry that makes up humanity’s collective identity.
As Harry grows closer to death, he mentions several times that he wants to write, despite having been previously uninterested in writing. The end of his life fast approaching, Harry feels the intense urge to leave his mark, to say and write all the unsaid, unwritten things that he has seen, done, and felt. At one point, Harry thinks that he only needs one paragraph of good writing to convey everything he needs to say. This remark is moving, as it seems impossible yet somehow truthful that an entire human life could be expressed in a single paragraph. Harry is simultaneously just one man in the vast history of humanity, but he’s also a person with a detailed, complex life that is worth recording and sharing with other humans. It is tragic that he is unable to write his final life account before his death.
The search for purity, happiness, and salvation
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” holds a nuanced view of the feasibility of reaching purity in one’s life. On the one hand, the text seems to suggest that true purity and salvation are not attainable for humans, and that they are potentially only reachable through death, as evidenced by both the leopard carcass and Harry’s journey to the peak of the mountain. On the other hand, the story also implies that certain ways of living will help one get as close as possible to purity and happiness, while other ways of living are antithetical to these values. Harry realizes that his dull, uncreative, materialistic, and shallow existence has been a moral and existential failure – it is a comfortable but sickly life, symbolized by his painless but nevertheless fatal wound.
However, there are moments in Harry’s past that approach purity. His memory of skiing down a mountain in the Alps during World War I is particularly resonant, as it relates to the idea of mountains as places of perfection and happiness. There are also his two genuinely loving marriages, his period living in a poor but vibrant Paris neighborhood, his season spent trout fishing, and the time that he gave away his own supply of morphine to an injured friend during the war. Harry looks back on these moments with a sense of yearning, knowing that they were the most important moments of his life, and that he traded them for money and convenience. Still, while these memories are associated with the elusive purity Harry strives for, they are not eternal—often, they fade quickly away, whether due to mistakes on Harry’s part or simply the general hardships and tragedies of human existence. Ultimately, there is no enduring purity or absolution to be found in our lives. We live in an impure, imperfect world; we make a range of choices and mistakes; we endure our regrets, all while looking for that “mountain peak” that might allow us to reach perfection and salvation. Hemingway’s story seems to theorize that this peak is unattainable until, through death, we are released from our mortal confines.
