The Snows Of Kilimanjaro Symbolism

Hemingway once said “All thinking men are atheist” perhaps this way of thinking is what inspired the development of his character Harry in his short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Harry was a writer who had fallen ill in the plains of Africa. His body began decaying from the outside in, and he would later fall into a sleep where he would never awaken. We are also met with the character of a leopard who dies, but instead of dying stinking in the plains, he dies in a frozen coffin of immortality at the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. I believe that Harry was characterized within this story to show the extreme similarity in spiritual development between himself and the leopard. Seeing as the leopard and Harry made it to the peak of the mountain …show more content…
He does so by showing us Harry’s moving spirit, he writes “all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going” (Hemingway 1036). Harry had passed on and his spirit had left his human body to meet God (or the God within himself) at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. This is all based on many African cultures mythology on the afterlife. Many of the African people believe that your spirit and body separate after death. The writers at A-Gallery, an online encyclopedia of eastern and southern African culture wrote an article titled Myths, Legends, Beliefs and Traditional Stories from Africa where they explain that “the soul of an individual lives on after death. Some people distinguish more than one spiritual essence living within one person, the life-soul or spirit which disappears at the moment of definitive death, and the thought-soul which keeps his individual identity even after it is separated from the body” (A-Gallery, 2008). These writers go on and explain further that these specific people in Africa also believe that an individual's spirit can become separate throughout their lives. For example, when Harry was in the war his spirit became separated from his physical being due to the blood-curdling cries of Williamson. In that moment Harry had made a life-altering decision, kill Williamson, or let him go out slowly and painless. Harry chose the latter, which is why his death seems almost ironic, but as Hemingway wrote in the story Harry believed that the Lord would never send him anything he couldn’t handle. Perhaps Harry thought he could handle the slow, painfully, rotting death he was designated by God, or the death he designated upon himself based on what