Compare and Contrast

Compare and Contrast

“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” tells of a writer, Harry, who faces almost immediate death in Africa from gangrene. A rescue plane is to fly in and rescue him, but his prognosis is grave. In the story, the great, white, hovering plane arrives, sparkling in the bright sun(Hays, 1990). The sustained metaphor of the mountaintop/leopard and the plain/hyena presents the sharp, controlled contrasts that make “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” one of Hemingway's most artistically successful stories. In this reverie, Harry sheds himself of Helen, who cannot go along because of the plane's limited capacity, but he approaches the land of the frozen leopard.

Throughout the story, Harry vacillates between consciousness and unconsciousness. His conscious periods become shorter and shorter. Unconsciousness reveries of his past fill his mind and reveal a great deal about his past. The passages during the unconscious state are printed in italics except for the one very near the end in which Harry hallucinates about the plane coming to rescue him. Hemingway places Harry on an acme artistically but shows him being devoured by those for whom he writes—or, perhaps, like the hyena in Hemingway's The Green Hills of Africa, he is self-devouring. Certainly like Belmonte, the bullfighter in The Sun Also Rises, he is exceptionally talented but appalled by his audience, represented in the story by Helen and by the hyena, both of whom weep at Harry's death(Berman, 2001). The sustained metaphor of the mountaintop/leopard and the plain/hyena presents the sharp, controlled contrasts that make “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” one of Hemingway's most artistically successful stories.

In contrast to the “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is the story “Babylon Revisited”. This story recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald's own alcoholic existence in Paris in the 1920's, Charlie Wales learns how truly relative wealth is. In losing, ...