Hemingway opens his story with an epigraph, a short, pithy observation about a lone leopard who sought the tip of Kilimanjaro (literally, “The House of God”).
The African safari was Harry’s attempt to put his life back on track. Harry, the central character, has been living a life of sloth, luxury, and procrastination, so this safari was supposed to bring him back to the virtues of hard work, honesty, and struggle as a step in the right direction. Living off of his wife’s wealth has led him down a path of steady, artistic decline and he knows it.
Also interesting to note is that both Harry and Hemingway were of the “Lost Generation” of World War I who had to rebuild their lives after being wounded in combat and seeing the horrors of war. This particular work, some have asserted, seems to reflect both Harry’s and Hemingway’s concerns about leaving unfinished business behind as a writer and the proper lifestyle for a writer that is conducive to writing on a daily basis. Hemingway was quoted as saying once that “politics, women, drink, money, and ambition” ruin writers.
Concerning the structure of this story, note that Hemingway divides it into six sections and within each of these sections inserts a flashback that appears in italic, continually juxtaposing the hopeless, harrowing present with the past, which often seemed full of promise.
The flashbacks themselves center around concerns about the erosion of values: lost love, loose sex, drinking, revenge, and war. They are a mix of hedonism, sentimentality toward the human condition, and leaving unfinished business. Here, in this story, the symbolism of Kilimanjaro is contrasted with the symbolism of the plains. Harry is dying in the plains from gangrene, a stinking, putrid, and deadly infection, causing his body to rot and turn greenish black. Against Harry’s background of dark, smelly horror and hopelessness, Hemingway contrasts Harry’s memories of the good times that he had in the mountains. Good things happen in the mountains; bad things happen on the plains. Hemingway ends his story with Harry’s spirit triumphant, as when Harry dies, his spirit is released and travels to the summit of the mighty mountain where the square top of Kilimanjaro is “wide as all the world”; it is incredibly white as it shines dazzlingly in the sunlight. The mountain is brilliant, covered with pure white snow; it is incredibly clean—a clean, well-lighted place.
It is important to note here that there were three deeds throughout Harry’s life that facilitated his otherworldly trip to Kilimanjaro at the time of this death:
Giving away his last morphine pills that he saved for himself to his friend Williamson, who is in horrendous pain
Harry’s intention to write (the mental writing of the flashbacks) in his painful stupor
Sacrificing himself to his wife as opposed to absolving himself
During his otherworldly flight over Kilimanjaro, Harry sees the legendary leopard. The dead, preserved leopard can be seen as a symbol of immortality, a reward for taking the difficult road. Harry himself was a “leopard” at certain times in his life, as were some of his acquaintances in his own stories. Specifically, Harry can be seen as a leopard during
His youth, when he lived in a poor neighborhood of Paris as a writer
In the war, when he gave his last morphine pills for himself to the horribly suffering Williamson
On his deathbed, when he mentally composes flashbacks and uses his intention to write
When he stays loyal to his wife and does not confess to her that he never really loved her
Some mystic impulse within Harry and within the leopard drove them to seek out God, or the god within themselves, or immortality that resided far from ugly, mundane reality.
In most civilizations, God or God’s promise of immortality resides on the highest mountain top: Mount Olympus for the Greeks, Mount Sinai for the Hebrews, Mount Fuji for the Japanese. If the leopard was searching for some sort of immortality, then it found immortality at the summit of Kilimanjaro, where it lies frozen—preserved for all eternity.
When Harry looks at Kilimanjaro, he sees it as a symbol of truth, idealism, and purity. When he dies, tragic irony exists. The leopard died in a high, clean, well-lighted place; Harry, in contrast, dies rotting and stinking on the plains, lamenting his wasted life and his failure to complete his desired projects.
In his novels and especially in his short stories, Hemingway often uses mountains to symbolize goodness, the purity, and cleanness, and he uses the plains as a symbol of evil and confusion. This contrast has often been commented on by Hemingway scholars.
Not surprisingly, because death is at the core of this story, one of the central themes that occurs again and again in Hemingway’s stories and novels is man’s direct encounter with death or with approaching death. Whether a man is in war and on the battlefield (as Nick Adams is in several stories; as are Hemingway heroes in his novels A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and parts of The Sun Also Rises) or facing death (as Nick Adams is when he is severely wounded in “A Way You’ll Never Be” and “In Another Country”), or on big game hunts, facing charging animals (as Francis Macomber is in “A Short Happy Life”), the theme of man’s direct encounter with death is always pivotal to the story. Death is always present as Hemingway examines how man reacts and behaves in the face of death. In this case, as with other of Hemingway’s heroes, we have a writer, Harry, who never writes what he has wanted to; now it is too late. Death is so near that it can be smelled, even in the presence of the stinking, smelly hyena.
