Kilimanjaro\' and \'Killers\' Ernest Hemingway Was Larger

¶ … Kilimanjaro' and 'Killers'

Ernest Hemingway was larger than life, a heroic American icon who stood for culture, class, sport, power and sex. He was a hunter, a fisherman, a connoisseur of bullfights and boxing and cigars. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. The author of classic stories and books, no writer in the nation had a higher profile than Hemingway. And finally, as novelist Robert Stone notes, he fell prey to " that fateful thing that destroys writers: He tried to be the hero of his own fiction. If you do that enough, all the weak seams in your personality are going to give way" (Cryer, 1999). Most critics agree that Hemingway was a part of his characters. He can be seen as Harry, in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and none perhaps more than Nick Adams who appears in many of his stories, including "Killers."

The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is considered by the majority of critics and Hemingway himself to be Hemingway's best writing. The story is of a writer, Harry, who has injured his leg on safari in Africa. The leg has become infected and he is dying. As he waits for help to arrive, he reflects on his life in flashbacks and narratives. He thinks of the women he loved and the ones he never loved but lied and convinced them that he did. He thinks about all the stories he waited to write until he could write well enough to do them justice, now they will never be written (Hemingway 1961). "He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself... By laziness, sloth, and by snobbery, by pride," Hemingway writes of Harry. Then he adds that "the thought of his own death obsessed him...." (Ross, 1963). Harry is similar to most of the Hemingway heroes. He is a professional who is committed to the life of action. He has painful memories that he has tried to repress, and which can only be warded off by containment in artistic form. His manhood has been damaged and corrupted by women, money and fear. Harry is much like Hemingway, obsessed with death and reflective of the irony of life. "It might be said that to know the full meaning of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is to know Hemingway" (Ross, 1963).

In his biography of Hemingway, Kenneth S. Lynn, states that "The Killers" has obvious influences of Hemingway's firsthand knowledge of small-time criminals in Kansas City (Berman, 1999). The story takes place in Henry's lunchroom. Hemingway's famous character Nick Adams is there, George is behind the counter, Sam, the cook, is in the kitchen and in walks in Al and Max, two hoodlums from Chicago sent to find and kill Ole Anderson, an ex-boxer (Hemingway, 1926). Although the dialogue of Al and Max takes up most of the story, Ole seems the main character even though we don't meet him until the end of the story. Max and Al enter with attitudes. They have a job to do and show great irritation at the others. Nick, George, and Sam are ordinary men with a sense of truth. They have never examined their own beliefs before but Al and Max force them to become conscious of their beliefs and to change their idea of logic. Ole Anderson is much like Harry in "Snows Of Kilimanjaro" in that he is waiting in his room knowing that death is coming and there is no place to go and no place to hide. It's inevitable, it's there, and it's real. In "The Killers" we see a world of small-town loyalties and heroism (Berman, 1999).

That Hemingway was writing about himself in his character Harry, is a view echoed by novelist and storywriter Richard Bausch who said, "Fitzgerald once said that Hemingway will be remembered for his great studies in fear. If you look at some of those stories, there's a naked profession of a kind of terror that he must have lived with all his life" (Cryer 1999). All of his work had to do with fear and death. Death is the basic honest fact that cannot be faked or cheated. When a man is faced with his own death, he sees see his own life clearly. And "the thought of death" was a deep obsession of Hemingway (Cyber, 1999).