American Literature

In Hemmingways The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Harry is the portrayal of the remorseful artist struggling with his art, a complacent and yet sensitive writer who has failed to translate his knowledge into the written word. He scrutinizes his past in contrast with the alarming reality of his present situation and contemplates the reasons for his artistic failure.

As a writer, Harrys memory is a rich tapestry of people, recollections, incidents, and geographies, waiting to be liberated from his scrapbook of remembering into the reality of pen and ink. Whether it was the purity of the Austrian Alps or the horrors of World War I, he never came around to write about any of it. His remorse is not only of an artist but of any man who have had experiences but the tyranny of time never allowed him to share them with others.

In a sense, Harry has bedded his muse  Helen. His wifes wealth has sent him on the path of steady artistic decline. His attitude oscillates between contempt and grudging affection towards her. This aspect echoes all artists writers, musicians, actors, who are misogynists, bearing a lovers grudge with their lives, choices, and muses.

Animal symbolism sheds further light into the kind of artist Harry is. The scavenging hyena is the artistic self that holds back the preserved leopard is the self that aspires and achieves. The leopard is Harrys artistic aspiration agility, grace, courage, diligence, pursuit, dignity however, he sadly realizes that he is the smelly hyena, looking for easy prey and feeding on leftovers.

Is he a failed artist, as perceived by Macdonald (1974), or a struggling one Harry might have traded his art for security and comfort, but those very things allowed him to experience life to the fullest. He is a man before he is an artist and living and not merely existing is also a form of homage to art, to life itself. Literature doesnt offer consolations, just a validation of the unpleasant realities i.e., life is both beautiful and horrible and time is never enough. Towards the end, Harry tells his wife in delirium that he has been writing, although he was recollecting and reliving his life in retrospect. These wax and ebb, sinking and recoveries are the trial flights of the soul before it trusts itself afar. Perhaps this ability gives Harry the transcendence in death. After all, Descartes declared I think therefore, I am.