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摘 要:海明威作为二十世纪美国最具天才的作家,他的非洲小说,对于美国人和美国社会具有特殊的意义与价值,而《乞力马扎罗的雪》就是其中之一。故事中讲述了作家哈里与女人海伦在非洲乞力马扎罗的西峰打猎遇难,在弥留之际哈里错综复杂的心理。主人公哈里的经历其实就是海明威自己的人生写照。通过从哈里回忆过去到现实的思绪转变,面对死亡时的从容镇定及对生的渴望来分析哈里在作品中的形象,并以此表达作者海明威的人生态度与价值观。
关键词:形象分析;哈里;《乞力马扎罗的雪》
I、Introduction
Ernest Hemingway,one of the greatest American writers,had a troubled and ever-changing life in which death and violence were the main constants.At the age of ten,his father gave him his first shotgun.Fifty-one years later,he shot himself with his beloved gun. Autobiography aside, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" became a central Hemingway story because in it the author dealt explicitly with themes of broad significance—a person's need to make a good death, the fickleness of fate, the moral guidance a primitive, natural world such as Africa gave cynical Americans. The story also questioned the hold wealth and privilege had upon the American imagination, because even during the Great Depression, value continued to be measured by materialistic standards.( Linda,1994)
Within the story, Hemingway softens Harry's objectionable character by including a quantity of flashbacks, set in italics, which pose as fragments of autobiography—the first man Harry sees killed in World War I, begging for death in order to escape the pain of his ruptured body; Harry's happiness while writing in Paris when the spirit of the new was everywhere; the beauty of skiing in Austria; the warmth of eating well after hunger. Right from the beginning of the story, one can see Harry's intuitive feeling that he is going to die. While traveling through the African bush in Tanganyika,Harry has hurt himself. A thorn scratched his flesh and the wound became septic and now gangrene has set in too. The man knows that this is the end.
2、Literature Review
2.1 Domestic Studies
Recently, more and more critics do the research on Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro,and the aspects they focus on are various. ZhuShiliang holds Harry’s death is a tragedy, money cauterizes his will, and he is destroyed by money.(Zhu,2000: 15) XiongRongbin and ZhangQin have seen the leopard of the headnote as a metaphor for Harry, and they have interpreted the leopard's climb up the mountain as Hemingway's metaphoric way of indicating Harry's achievement of moral or artistic integrity during the final hours of his life.(Xiong&Zhang,1986: 54) Another critic says Harry is neither a hero nor coward, like everyone else, he is an ordinary man. He makes great effort to pursue what he wants and make his life valuable.(Li,2007:94)
2.4 International Studies
Commentators have made numerous attempts to analyze the theme, the character and the style to discover their meaning. Marion Montgomery feels that Harry's “salvation” is not justified by his nature and that his journey to Kilimanjaro is, thus, a sentimental attempt to give the story a happy ending.( Scott,1997:68) Critic Max Westbrook feels that Harry's flight metaphorically indicates that Harry has received redemption from moral and physical decay by honestly recognizing his failures and thereby coming to a “knowledge of the real.” ( Scott,1997:70)
2.3 Comments
Though critics have different views towards Harry’s character and his image in the work, the researches on these aspects are still have limitations more or less. The critics do not touch the deeper perspectives of the analysis of Harry’s image. They don’t connect Harry’s image with the author himself.
3、Theoretical Framework and Critica lApproach
Psychoanalysis ,feminist criticism and ecological criticism have a long history of being used to analyze the character and the symbol in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, but these attitudes have been increasingly challenged in recent years. This paper tries to analyze Harry’s image in the work by using biographical criticism.
Biographical Criticism begins with the simple but central insight that literature is written by actual people and that understanding an author’s life can help readers more thoroughly comprehend the work. Anyone who reads the biography of a writer quickly sees how much an author’s experience shapes---both directly and indirectly---what he or she creats. Reading that biography will also change (and usually deepen) our response to the work.. Sometimes even knowing a single important fact illuminates our reading of a poem or story. Biographical Criticism focuses on explicating the literary work by using the insight provided by knowledge of the author’s life.( Wilfred L ,2004:30)
4、Discussion and Analysis
4.1 Harry’s Thinking Changing from the Past to the Present
From the beginning of the story, Harry knows that he is dying but knows it with an intellectual detachment. His relationship with the woman is that of the friendly enemy—a quarrelsome, superficial connection. Within the first series of reminiscences, Harry's thoughts turn to snow scenes, mountains, betrayal, good skiing, and the birth of God (four Christmases are mentioned). This juncture of disparate topics mirrors the chaotic world of the war generation. The topics are somewhat general; Hemingway indicates that they do not touch the inner Harry by causing Harry to break them off, returning the story to the present. The memory of the German inn triggers Harry to ask Helen about a Paris hotel. His willingness to exchange the past for idle chatter with the woman proves his lack of commitment to it. Moreover, the past has not yet cauterized Harry's festered spirit: he slips easily into the familiar lie that symbolizes his lost integrity.( Gloria R,1997:54)
The second set of recollections uncovers the real Harry; it deals with his loves and with his wartime trauma, “the things that he could never think of.” In the section following these memories, one can note several changes in the protagonist: he passionately desires to write, he no longer falls back on deterministic reasoning, he associates the woman with death and therefore cannot maintain the lie, and he feels death with his senses. The narrative reflects the nearer approach of death by dwelling increasingly on the past and shortening the present passages to interludes. The third group of reminiscences contains a brief reference to the castration theme but centers on Harry's vocation and its beginning in Paris.
4.2 Harry’s Calmness When Facing Death
Like every other human, he is afraid of death; like everyone else he wants to avoid it and save his life. And since he knows he cannot, since he knows that gangrene is usually fatal, he is bitter with himself and his wife— more than usually bitter.
Instead of considering death as an event in time as he had to begin with and perhaps has done all his life, comes to look upon it as a living presence. The story thereafter unfolds the slow arrival of death at his side— its physical arrival. With the onset of gangrene the physical pain has stopped, and he no longer has that pressure on his nervous system to keep him in fear of the event. “Since the gangrene started in his right leg he had no pain and with the pain the horror had gone and all he felt now was a great tiredness and anger that this was the end of it.” One can read: “For years it had obsessed him; but now it meant nothing in itself.” (Wan,1981:256)So the fear of the event has actually stopped, at least for the time being. But at the other level, the diastolic level, another kind of awareness is coming into existence. It is slow in appearing, but once the process has started it gathers momentum. His death is now not an event for him in time, but a weird companion of life, and just as at one time life had possessed the soul of Harry completely, now death was going to take possession of him as completely.( Chaman,1997:89)
As the story proceeds, Harry's awareness of death becomes sharper. His wife has just returned with some game for him which she has shot, and in the evening they are having a drink together. Harry is feeling remorseful for having been so bitter to her in the morning. He thinks she is a good woman, considerate all the time—“marvellous really.” And then, for the first time in the story, his realization of death comes on him. He is in fact at the moment talking of other things, his mind not preoccupied with dying. ( Chaman,1997:96)
4.3 Harry’s Long for Living
For years, as he has been reprimanding himself, Harry had written nothing. For years he had frittered away his creativity. But with the near arrival of death, with the arrival of something so new and so powerful, what happens is that his creativity also returns to him. He suddenly wants to write in this minute now.
The tight mood returns, and he again wants to hang on to life; he is by turns afraid of death and also attracted to it. “He lay still and death was not there. It must have gone around another street. It went in pairs, on bicycles, and moved absolutely silently on the pavements.” (Wan,1981:280) His wife nags him about his drinking but, unconcerned, he lapses into the relaxed mode and his mind roams over some of the stories that he could have written but never did. Once again he returns to the tight mood and once again he does not wish to die. He would rather be in better company.
Harry retains enough honesty to judge himself rightly in his last hours. He strives to write then all that he had evaded earlier, assured that quality more than makes up for quantity. In certain sense, Harry matches the leopard in surmounting the naturalism of his contemporaries
5、Conclusion
5.1 Main Findings
Generally speaking,Hemingway’s life was full of change,hurt,sadness,and violence.The general public never did know Ernest Hemingway,who was a human with a human’s problem.Burgess wrote in his study of Hemingway:
He’s a good writer, Hemingway. He writes as he is .He’s a big, powerful peasant,as strong as a buffalo, a sportsman,and ready to live the life he writes about. He would never have it if his body had not allowed him to live it.But giants of his sort are truly modest; there is much more behind Hemingway’s form than people know.( Hays,1990:39) The interpretation of the character Harry shaped by Hemingway and his own biography are consistent as one might expect.
5.2 Implications
On the surface it looks as though Harry in these passages is thinking of his early life. Memories of the war, his earlier love affairs, his fishing and hunting trips of the past, his days in Paris, do come and crowd his mind at the moment. But these images he recalls not to find refuge or support for his present fate. In Harry’s flight toward death, his behavior achieves Hemingway's personal standard; though Harry's struggle end in failure and death, he do receive one kind of immortality. Therefore, that section of the story simultaneously proves the hero and voices the author's belief: to be true to the senses is the writer's ultimate duty. Although an artist may not be able to actually achieve immortality, he can come somewhere close to it by unremitting endeavor.(Wan,1981:252)
Works Cited:
[1]Wagner——Martin,Linda."The Snows of Kiliman jaro:Overview."Reference Guide to Short Fiction. Ed. Noelle Watson. Detroit: St. James Press,1994.
[2]朱世亮,简析《乞力马扎罗的雪》中哈里的形象[J] 合肥联合大学学报 Vol9, No.3, Sept2000, p15.
[3]熊荣彬,张勤,生与死的写真—试析《乞力马扎罗的雪》的表现手法(《外国小说名篇选读》)作家出版社,1986, p54.
[4]李亚南,区林,《乞力马扎罗山的雪》的底蕴解读[J] 云南师范大学学报(哲学社会科学版)Vol39,No.5,Sept 2007,p92-96.
关键词:形象分析;哈里;《乞力马扎罗的雪》
I、Introduction
Ernest Hemingway,one of the greatest American writers,had a troubled and ever-changing life in which death and violence were the main constants.At the age of ten,his father gave him his first shotgun.Fifty-one years later,he shot himself with his beloved gun. Autobiography aside, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" became a central Hemingway story because in it the author dealt explicitly with themes of broad significance—a person's need to make a good death, the fickleness of fate, the moral guidance a primitive, natural world such as Africa gave cynical Americans. The story also questioned the hold wealth and privilege had upon the American imagination, because even during the Great Depression, value continued to be measured by materialistic standards.( Linda,1994)
Within the story, Hemingway softens Harry's objectionable character by including a quantity of flashbacks, set in italics, which pose as fragments of autobiography—the first man Harry sees killed in World War I, begging for death in order to escape the pain of his ruptured body; Harry's happiness while writing in Paris when the spirit of the new was everywhere; the beauty of skiing in Austria; the warmth of eating well after hunger. Right from the beginning of the story, one can see Harry's intuitive feeling that he is going to die. While traveling through the African bush in Tanganyika,Harry has hurt himself. A thorn scratched his flesh and the wound became septic and now gangrene has set in too. The man knows that this is the end.
2、Literature Review
2.1 Domestic Studies
Recently, more and more critics do the research on Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro,and the aspects they focus on are various. ZhuShiliang holds Harry’s death is a tragedy, money cauterizes his will, and he is destroyed by money.(Zhu,2000: 15) XiongRongbin and ZhangQin have seen the leopard of the headnote as a metaphor for Harry, and they have interpreted the leopard's climb up the mountain as Hemingway's metaphoric way of indicating Harry's achievement of moral or artistic integrity during the final hours of his life.(Xiong&Zhang,1986: 54) Another critic says Harry is neither a hero nor coward, like everyone else, he is an ordinary man. He makes great effort to pursue what he wants and make his life valuable.(Li,2007:94)
2.4 International Studies
Commentators have made numerous attempts to analyze the theme, the character and the style to discover their meaning. Marion Montgomery feels that Harry's “salvation” is not justified by his nature and that his journey to Kilimanjaro is, thus, a sentimental attempt to give the story a happy ending.( Scott,1997:68) Critic Max Westbrook feels that Harry's flight metaphorically indicates that Harry has received redemption from moral and physical decay by honestly recognizing his failures and thereby coming to a “knowledge of the real.” ( Scott,1997:70)
2.3 Comments
Though critics have different views towards Harry’s character and his image in the work, the researches on these aspects are still have limitations more or less. The critics do not touch the deeper perspectives of the analysis of Harry’s image. They don’t connect Harry’s image with the author himself.
3、Theoretical Framework and Critica lApproach
Psychoanalysis ,feminist criticism and ecological criticism have a long history of being used to analyze the character and the symbol in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, but these attitudes have been increasingly challenged in recent years. This paper tries to analyze Harry’s image in the work by using biographical criticism.
Biographical Criticism begins with the simple but central insight that literature is written by actual people and that understanding an author’s life can help readers more thoroughly comprehend the work. Anyone who reads the biography of a writer quickly sees how much an author’s experience shapes---both directly and indirectly---what he or she creats. Reading that biography will also change (and usually deepen) our response to the work.. Sometimes even knowing a single important fact illuminates our reading of a poem or story. Biographical Criticism focuses on explicating the literary work by using the insight provided by knowledge of the author’s life.( Wilfred L ,2004:30)
4、Discussion and Analysis
4.1 Harry’s Thinking Changing from the Past to the Present
From the beginning of the story, Harry knows that he is dying but knows it with an intellectual detachment. His relationship with the woman is that of the friendly enemy—a quarrelsome, superficial connection. Within the first series of reminiscences, Harry's thoughts turn to snow scenes, mountains, betrayal, good skiing, and the birth of God (four Christmases are mentioned). This juncture of disparate topics mirrors the chaotic world of the war generation. The topics are somewhat general; Hemingway indicates that they do not touch the inner Harry by causing Harry to break them off, returning the story to the present. The memory of the German inn triggers Harry to ask Helen about a Paris hotel. His willingness to exchange the past for idle chatter with the woman proves his lack of commitment to it. Moreover, the past has not yet cauterized Harry's festered spirit: he slips easily into the familiar lie that symbolizes his lost integrity.( Gloria R,1997:54)
The second set of recollections uncovers the real Harry; it deals with his loves and with his wartime trauma, “the things that he could never think of.” In the section following these memories, one can note several changes in the protagonist: he passionately desires to write, he no longer falls back on deterministic reasoning, he associates the woman with death and therefore cannot maintain the lie, and he feels death with his senses. The narrative reflects the nearer approach of death by dwelling increasingly on the past and shortening the present passages to interludes. The third group of reminiscences contains a brief reference to the castration theme but centers on Harry's vocation and its beginning in Paris.
4.2 Harry’s Calmness When Facing Death
Like every other human, he is afraid of death; like everyone else he wants to avoid it and save his life. And since he knows he cannot, since he knows that gangrene is usually fatal, he is bitter with himself and his wife— more than usually bitter.
Instead of considering death as an event in time as he had to begin with and perhaps has done all his life, comes to look upon it as a living presence. The story thereafter unfolds the slow arrival of death at his side— its physical arrival. With the onset of gangrene the physical pain has stopped, and he no longer has that pressure on his nervous system to keep him in fear of the event. “Since the gangrene started in his right leg he had no pain and with the pain the horror had gone and all he felt now was a great tiredness and anger that this was the end of it.” One can read: “For years it had obsessed him; but now it meant nothing in itself.” (Wan,1981:256)So the fear of the event has actually stopped, at least for the time being. But at the other level, the diastolic level, another kind of awareness is coming into existence. It is slow in appearing, but once the process has started it gathers momentum. His death is now not an event for him in time, but a weird companion of life, and just as at one time life had possessed the soul of Harry completely, now death was going to take possession of him as completely.( Chaman,1997:89)
As the story proceeds, Harry's awareness of death becomes sharper. His wife has just returned with some game for him which she has shot, and in the evening they are having a drink together. Harry is feeling remorseful for having been so bitter to her in the morning. He thinks she is a good woman, considerate all the time—“marvellous really.” And then, for the first time in the story, his realization of death comes on him. He is in fact at the moment talking of other things, his mind not preoccupied with dying. ( Chaman,1997:96)
4.3 Harry’s Long for Living
For years, as he has been reprimanding himself, Harry had written nothing. For years he had frittered away his creativity. But with the near arrival of death, with the arrival of something so new and so powerful, what happens is that his creativity also returns to him. He suddenly wants to write in this minute now.
The tight mood returns, and he again wants to hang on to life; he is by turns afraid of death and also attracted to it. “He lay still and death was not there. It must have gone around another street. It went in pairs, on bicycles, and moved absolutely silently on the pavements.” (Wan,1981:280) His wife nags him about his drinking but, unconcerned, he lapses into the relaxed mode and his mind roams over some of the stories that he could have written but never did. Once again he returns to the tight mood and once again he does not wish to die. He would rather be in better company.
Harry retains enough honesty to judge himself rightly in his last hours. He strives to write then all that he had evaded earlier, assured that quality more than makes up for quantity. In certain sense, Harry matches the leopard in surmounting the naturalism of his contemporaries
5、Conclusion
5.1 Main Findings
Generally speaking,Hemingway’s life was full of change,hurt,sadness,and violence.The general public never did know Ernest Hemingway,who was a human with a human’s problem.Burgess wrote in his study of Hemingway:
He’s a good writer, Hemingway. He writes as he is .He’s a big, powerful peasant,as strong as a buffalo, a sportsman,and ready to live the life he writes about. He would never have it if his body had not allowed him to live it.But giants of his sort are truly modest; there is much more behind Hemingway’s form than people know.( Hays,1990:39) The interpretation of the character Harry shaped by Hemingway and his own biography are consistent as one might expect.
5.2 Implications
On the surface it looks as though Harry in these passages is thinking of his early life. Memories of the war, his earlier love affairs, his fishing and hunting trips of the past, his days in Paris, do come and crowd his mind at the moment. But these images he recalls not to find refuge or support for his present fate. In Harry’s flight toward death, his behavior achieves Hemingway's personal standard; though Harry's struggle end in failure and death, he do receive one kind of immortality. Therefore, that section of the story simultaneously proves the hero and voices the author's belief: to be true to the senses is the writer's ultimate duty. Although an artist may not be able to actually achieve immortality, he can come somewhere close to it by unremitting endeavor.(Wan,1981:252)
Works Cited:
[1]Wagner——Martin,Linda."The Snows of Kiliman jaro:Overview."Reference Guide to Short Fiction. Ed. Noelle Watson. Detroit: St. James Press,1994.
[2]朱世亮,简析《乞力马扎罗的雪》中哈里的形象[J] 合肥联合大学学报 Vol9, No.3, Sept2000, p15.
[3]熊荣彬,张勤,生与死的写真—试析《乞力马扎罗的雪》的表现手法(《外国小说名篇选读》)作家出版社,1986, p54.
[4]李亚南,区林,《乞力马扎罗山的雪》的底蕴解读[J] 云南师范大学学报(哲学社会科学版)Vol39,No.5,Sept 2007,p92-96.