Kahla Wilson
AP English Pd. 1
April 24, 2008
Hemingway: The Suicide Writer
Ernest Hemingway is one of the best known authors of all time. He is known in classrooms all over the United States and around the world. Hemingway had his own unique and interesting style of writing, which included many personal writing characteristics, as well as writing a lot on his own life. That is, by having his characters have many personal experiences and reactions and dialogue that he experienced and is known for in his own daily life. Some may say that Hemingway’s characters are simply a portrait of himself.

Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was written about a man who is dying from gangrene on his leg. Harry, the main character, has gangrene because he did not put iodine on a scratch he got, and then it became infected. He and his wife are stranded in Africa as the short story shows and he is dying. The man is half hallucinating as he thinks about what he wanted to write but never got the chance to. Also, the man insults his wife because there is nothing better to do and he is dying. He thinks back and confides in himself and the reader that he doesn’t actually love her and that the lie is easy to continue living because each of the women he has been with was rich. In real life the author Hemingway had many wives. Whether he loved each of them much or whether he married them for wealth we may never know. The things Harry is thinking he should have written are about war and his time in Paris and his travels. Hemingway did all of these things also. Harry is constantly criticizing his own works and saying over and over how he hasn’t written much of anything and he’s continually mauling over how much he still wants to write but is dying and will not be able to do so. Hemingway also writes a lot about death in this short story. The vultures and the hyenas are symbols of death and the coming of death. Also, Harry can “feel” and “smell death’s breath” as it climbs on him.
“He had just felt death come again… just then, death had come and rested its head on the foot of the cot and he could smell its breath… it had moved up on him now, but it had no shape any more. It simply occupied space… It did not go away but moved a little closer… It moved up closer to him still and now he could not speak to it.... (The Snows 25)”
Hemingway also writes about a leopard being frozen at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. “Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude (The Snows 3)”. Leo Gurko in his book about Ernest Hemingway’s writings believes that the leopard parallels Hemingway’s own life in that he tried too hard to reach the summit where his dreams were and instead was always climbing up the mountain. By the time he was truly famous, just like any author, he was dead, just as the leopard was. By the time the leopard reached his goal of reaching the top of the mountain he froze to death. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was Hemingway’s favorite story (Gurko 198).
Hemingway also writes with limited conversations between people. The conversations foreshadow things to come, such as in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Harry and his wife are talking back and forth but it’s hard to tell they are because Hemingway doesn’t say who’s talking. There’s only dialogue.
“Yes,” he said. “Your damned money was my armour. My Swift and my Armour.”
“Don’t.”
“All right. I’ll stop that. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“It’s a little bit late now.”
“All right then. I’ll go on hurting you. It’s more amusing. The only thing I ever really liked to do with you I can’t do now.”
“No, that’s not true. You liked to do many things and everything you wanted to do I did.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake stop breaking, will you?” (The Snows 9)
With this limited conversation, some critics think Hemingway is trying to show the way human life is short and direct (Gurko ).
Hemingway also wrote “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” about two waiters, one young and one old, talking after closing hours about an elderly man who drinks too much (A Clean). The themes of the story are clean and dirty, light and darkness, time, death, nothing has meaning, age differences, and the importance of names. Hemingway again uses his conversation style in this story, demonstrating how little needs to be said between the characters for a point to get across. When Hemingway writes, the themes he uses are generated from his own views on life and human behavior. The themes are clearly displayed in this short story. The elderly man speaks of cleanliness in a café and how it is needed for a place to “feel right.” He doesn’t like bars and bodegas because they are either not lit right or they are unpolished. The elderly man speaks to himself and to the other younger waiter about light and darkness. The older waiter explains how he likes light in order to sleep. “I am one of those who like to stay at the café... with all those who need a light for the night.” The short story also ends with the older waiter falling asleep once day break comes and brings light. “He would lie in the bed and finally, with day break, he would go to sleep.” When the younger, hurried waiter says to close up and go home for the night, the older, not hurried waiter is reluctant because “there may be someone who needs the café.” Then when the young waiter points out the fact that there are bodegas and bars open, the older man says it just isn’t the same to go to those places because they are not clean and well lit. The man is talking about comfort, and how humans like to be in nice, comfortable settings where the place is clean and polished and well lit instead of dark and dreary and pitiful. It’s all emotions and feelings. The older waiter ends up stopping at one bar on his way home and points out to the barman how the place is nicely lit but unpolished and the barman just ignores him. Hemingway also writes about time by using the younger and older waiters. The older waiters seems to have all the time in the world because he wants to keep the café open and stay longer, but the younger waiter is in a hurry to get home. In one statement, waiters are arguing over how much an hour weighs to each mean. The old man says “What is an hour?” and the younger waiter replies “More to me than to him.” Death is a common theme in most all of Hemingway’s short stories. It would appear that Hemingway is focused a lot on death and how to die and what goes through your mind as your dying and why you’re dying. In this short story we see that the old man attempted suicide. One waiter believes it’s because he’s lonely, but the other waiter is not so sure. Either way, Hemingway seems to foreshadow his own death in this particular short story by having one of his characters attempt suicide. Another theme in this short story that Hemingway brings up is how nothing has meaning. At one point while the older waiter is discussing things with himself he starts rambling on about nada, which is the Spanish word for ‘nothing.’ He says about the light, “Some lived in it but never felt it but he knew it was all nada y pues nada y pues nada y pues nada...” He then goes on to tell the Christian prayer filling in the word ‘nada’ with every few words, especially words explaining divinities and deities. Many believe this is how Hemingway views life, especially because he committed suicide, showing that his life and the people around him and his works meant nothing any more. Life was not worth living anymore to him. One of the last themes Hemingway shows in this short story is the differences on the outlook on life in age groups. The younger waiter was in a hurry to get home early even though he usually got home by 3 AM. He was much more hostile to the drunk old man than the older waiter was. The older waiter seemed to relate to the older man better because the older waiter said he had basically nothing besides a job. In a conversation with the younger waiter he explains the difference between himself and the other waiter.
“‘You have youth, confidence, and a job,’ the older waiter said. ‘You have everything.’
“’And what do you lack?’
“’Everything but work.’”
Clearly Hemingway was trying to portray the fact that older people have nothing to live for. Hemingway’s younger waiter also criticizes the old man by saying that he has everything in the world because he had money. Obviously Hemingway is saying that money and wealth are not everything a person needs in life because the old man tried to commit suicide even though he was wealthy. In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” Hemingway makes another statement about money by showing the fact that Harry was depressed and did not love his wife, even though she was rich and he had everything he needed. By this common theme we can assume that Hemingway does not see money as the key thing for a person to live happily ever after, even though it is hard for us as readers to look at Hemingway for help on how to live a happy life since he did commit suicide. The last theme in this short story is the importance of names. No one in this story had a name, including the older waiter, the younger waiter, and the old man, or the old man’s niece of the soldier and the girl or the barman. No one had names. This is more than likely because Hemingway wanted the emphasis to be more on the age difference and the way one waiter was rushed and the other was more laid back. Giving names to any of these characters would not have added anything to their personality, but in fact it more than likely would have taken away from the main themes of the book that Hemingway is trying to get across to his readers. Hemingway is famous for writing like this. He puts a lot of impact on the themes in each of his novels and short stories.
Another short story Hemingway wrote is “A Day’s Wait.” In this short story, Hemingway’s main theme is death. The whole day a little boy waits for death to come because he thinks he has an extremely high temperature by not understanding the difference between degrees of Celsius and Fahrenheit. The whole story is about this confusion, and because of it the little boy starts thinking of all he would have done if he were not going to die.