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Abstract: The Snows of Kilimanjaro reveals the quest of Harry and Hemingway and their puzzlement about existence. This paper will make a preliminary study of the quest plot in The Snows of Kilimanjaro from the perspective of archetype.
Key Words: The Snows of Kilimanjaro, quest，quest variant, archetype
1.Introduction
The Snows of Kilimanjaro, one of the famous short stories written by Ernest Hemingway, is about a regretful, wasted author named Harry who is lying on an African plain dying of gangrene. The story reflects Hemingway’s life-consciousness and interprets the post-war trauma experienced by “the lost generation” to some extent. Like many other writers, Hemingway adds something of strangeness in the literary conventions while following them.In this way he passes on and enlarges the literary conventions. And he creates a fresh quest variant which provides the traditional quest a counterpart to compare.
This short story is widely read and very popular in many countries around the world. In the story, Hemingway depicts Harry’s puzzlement about existence and his constant quest. He becomes the focus of many scholars’ attention. The key point for the selection of quest archetype is that the story reflects clearly the ideological picture in the postwar America and man’s puzzlement about existence and the constant quest.
My assumption is that the archetypal theory will be very helpful to analyze the quest plot. To illustrate this idea, the following paragraphs will attempt to analyze Harry’s constant quest experience in his life from the archetypal perspective, which will have great significance in thinking about the meaning of human’s existence today.
2.Literature Review
As a great literary figure, Ernest Hemingway is always the focus of critics’ attention. And his famous short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro is often studied by critics at home and broad.
2.1 International Studies
Harry died spiritually the day he traded his integrity for security, and here he is dying now with a gangrenous leg…. His gangrenous leg is token symbol of his moral gangrene as creative writer. Obversely put, writing is a struggle, an act of labor and pain…. But Harry never exerted himself, never tried because he feared he might fail….(Gunton, 1981:212).
2.2 Domestic Studies
In the story, Hemingway wants to reveal Harry’s quest for eternity. The square top of Kilimanjaro, the frozen carcass of a leopard and the snows of Kilimanjaro, and so on represent eternity. And eternity can be obtained in death. (Xiao Yi, 1999:102; Zhang Guoshen, 2003:72)
Harry is just like other people; he once had the quest for career, love, and also tried to achieve greatness. His memories of the cruel war, his experience and quest in other countries reflect Harry’s constant pursuit. He is eager to pursue the meaning of life. And the quest of the leopard appearing at the beginning of the text is a reflection of continuous quest of Harry and namely Hemingway in their life, shows that why writing is the lifeline of Harry and Hemingway and the quest comes to an end; eternity can be obtained only in constant pursuit and how the meaning of life is revealed when confronting death. (Li Yanan& Ou Lin, 2007:94)Harry’s interior monologue shows he has been pursuing his first love. He comes to Africa in quest for excellence in his writing (Du Jianxiong & Chen Yan, 2007:261).
The above-mentioned ideas about Harry emphasize his constant quest for eternity, career, love, and also excellence in life. However, I think these ideas are not all-round. Both Harry and Hemingway are of the “Lost Generation” of World War I who have to quest the meaning of life and rebuild their lives after being wounded in combat and seeing the horrors of war. This short story also reveals their puzzlement about existence and their spiritual quest. This paper analyzes the quest plot from the archetypal perspective.
3.Theoretic Framework and Critical Approaches
C.G.Jung was the developer of the term of archetype. He regarded collective unconscious as a deeper layer upon which personal unconscious rests. And the contents of collective unconscious are signified as archetype. Different from the contents of personal unconscious “which have at one time been conscious but which have disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed, the contents of the collective unconscious have never been in consciousness, and therefore have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to heredity.” Therefore, archetype in Jung’s understanding is the psychological heritage of human being. It refers to “universal images that have existed since the remotest times” or “definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere” (Jung, 1999:5, 42). In other words, archetype refers to those images or phenomena that appear frequently within a culture as well as everywhere in different cultures.
Northrop Frye (Guerin, 2004: 167) applied Jung’s theory of archetype in the filed of literature. He began to collect, sort out and analyze literary images or phenomena that frequently appears in literary works. They include all kinds of recurring narrative structures, imageries and characters modes. Frye regarded them as archetypes in literature. What he and especially the later archetypal critics did was to categorize them and use them to conduct their analysis of works of literary art. Jung once mentioned that: “There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution.” In literature, archetype is a narration as well as an expression of life and mind. There are surely no fewer archetypes in literature than that in daily life.
Among various archetypes in literature, quest is an important one. Frye once claimed,“The complete form of the romance is clearly the successful quest.”(Guerin, 2004:167) Joseph Campbell, another famous critic after Frye, even regarded quest as the archetypal outline plot of nearly all myths in all cultures. He thought that the quest archetype defined much of the literature in human history.
Quest stories in literary history are many, but two elements are essential for any quest. One is the hero; the other is the adventure. The hero contains common attributes like fate and background. Specifically speaking, they share similar birth, special weapon, supernatural help, self-proof, and incurable wound. Regarding to the adventure, Frye divided a quest into three parts: perilous journey, struggle, and the final exaltation of the hero. So a quest is a journey, full of so many troubles and difficulties that struggle is inescapably needed. Moreover, in a quest, the attributes a hero contains as well as the help from the supernatural finally render the adventure with a successful ending. These three parts constitutes a quest pattern. It is the basic plot structure of a traditional quest.
4.Discussion and Analysis
It is obvious that The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a story of questing. But the quest in this story is a little different from the traditional quest.
First, The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a story of human spiritual quest. This is human being’s quest for values. Does the leopard come close to the western summit of Kilimanjaro for a certain quest? Maybe different people have different ideas. We can think about it from Harry’s experience– the counterpart of image of the dead leopard. In the story, Harry is a person who could not find the meaning of life. The African safari was Harry’s attempt to put his life back on track. Harry 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.
Africa was where he had been happiest in the good
time of his life, so he had come out here to start again.
(Jiang Xiaomei, 2003:66)
But he eventually faces death because he is scratched on the leg by a thorn, and the infection becomes gangrenous. Here his leg is rotting away just as his life as a writer decayed due to his laziness. In fact, this is the inevitable result of the failure of Harry’s spiritual quest. This short story reveals man’s living situation at that time. He experienced the distressing post-war trauma. To some extent, his quest represents the journey of the spiritual quest of that generation.
The dead leopard is not only a simple image, and it is the entry points of narration in this story and has a profound meaning. The reader is familiar with the myth of the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard that tried to reach the climax of Kilimanjaro, known as the House of God. People like to think of heaven as some place joyful, elevated and cool to believe that a superior and better life awaits them where they can comfortably rest on God’s side. Therefore, the leopard’s perseverance, strength and courage enable it to attain heaven. In addition, the leopard suggests that its qualities can not be associated to Harry’s qualities since the latter lets himself carry by helicopter to the House of God as opposed to the beast which made its own way up. Here the leopard represents all that he has not accomplished. As we know that the leopard, being the fastest land animal has mastered his surroundings and accomplished greatness. Harry’s quest for excellence in his writing is shown throughout the story; this is directly correrlery to the great skill and dominance of the leopard of his kingdom. Harry strives to be like the leopard and accomplish greatness, but he fails. 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.
Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high,
and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit
is called the Masai “Ngaje Ngai,” the house of God. Close to the
western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard.
No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at the altitude.
(Jiang Xiaomei, 2003:58)
Hemingway uses the leopard in the epigram at the beginning of the story to represent what Harry would like to be, someone with strength, courage and passion. The leopard is found at the top of the mountain and why it went there is a mystery. In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” the mountain Kilimanjaro itself represents the heights of art: the savanna is humid, rotting, hot, and teeming with life, while the mountain peak is clean, arid, and pure. And it also represents the afterlife, a place of inspiration that Harry can go to achieve the characteristics of the leopard. The primary question is whether Harry’s journey into the peak of the mountain represents transcendence. Many critics have argued that it does. On a symbolic level, then, Harry’s festering leg represents his talent, that is rotting due to a lack of understanding, and the leopard of the story’s epigraph represents Harry himself: he scaled the heights only to die there.
Second, Harry’s quest for love, pleasure and also he tries to achieve greatness in life. He intends to write something (the mental writing of the flashbacks) in his painful stupor. In the italicized flashbacks, we see Harry as he was in his earlier life, especially in Paris, where he lived in bohemian poverty and devoted his energies to writing. But he consistently regrets leaving that behind. He gave up, in a sense, and began spending his time drinking,raveling, hunting, and chasing rich women. He became “what he despised,” as the narrator says.
And he had chosen to make his living with something
else instead of a pen or a pencil. (Jiang Xiaomei, 2003:68)
He had traded it for security, for comfort too, there was
no denying that, and for what else? (Jiang Xiaomei, 2003:70)
But in the flashback sections, Harry faces his life. His flashbacks show the reader that he has had an exciting and well-travelled life, but that he is also haunted by his memories of World War I. He served in the U.S. Army in that war and saw combat on the Eastern front, in the Balkans, and Austria. The violence and death that he saw there come back to him as his rotting leg tells him that he is about to die. Harry’s past is not all negative. He is a writer, and in his flashbacks he thinks about his vocation and about all of the stories he wanted to write that he never took the time to begin. He has spent time in Paris with the artists and writers who lived there in the 1920s and is familiar with the Place de la Contrescarpe, a popular bohemian locale of the time. His flashbacks also show that he is an experienced outdoorsman. Hemingway also describes the various failure and regret issues the main characters must examine: Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well (Jiang Xiaomei, 2003:60). Well, he would never fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now. Harry’s struggle concerns things he failed to complete.
Harry had been a promising young writer who fell in with a rich crowd because, he told himself, he wanted to write about them. “He had had his life and it was over and then he went living it again with different people and more money,” the narrator states. However, he was seduced by their luxuries and allowed those luxuries to distract him from his true calling. “Each day of not writing,” the narrator continues, “of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.” To purge himself of this luxury and to remind himself of the hardships that drove him to his best work, he and his wife took this safari “with the minimum of comfort” so that “in some way he could work the fat off his soul the way a fighter went into the mountains to work and train in order to burn it out of his body.”
In quest variant, the plot structure of the traditional quest is transformed into another structure of mental struggle. The mental struggle embodies itself mainly in Harry’s fragmented past. 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”
…ahead, 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. (Jiang Xiaomei, 2003:88)
The ending of their quests is also metaphorical. The plot structure of the quest variant is changed into mental struggle and an inevitable failure at the end. And the questing process is also a metaphor of human’s existence, and the object that the quest aims to seek is a metaphor of the meaning or values that human being seeks in his existence.
In this thesis, there are still some points that are open to discuss and needs improvement. Firstly, the limited access to original materials makes me very difficult and impossible to get every necessary book. So some quotations are quoted from books in Chinese and translated by myself. Secondly, as a Chinese who has not experienced the existential cultural movement in western developed countries, my understanding of it is impossible to be completely precise. Some inaccuracy is thus doomed. And the profound analysis is never exhausted. So this paper is far from completing its mission. More efforts are still needed to the exploration of the quest concerning archetypal theory.
5.Conclusion
Ernest Hemingway expressed his notion of life and happiness in his short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro. In fact, in this short story, Hemingway explores the protagonist’s constant quest, emphasizes the animal symbolism and represents Sisyphus of the ancient Greek mythology by his opposite to suggest that perseverance is the key to happiness. Hemingway changes archetypal pattern into journey, clues and an uncertain ending. Besides this, in plots related to quest, he depicts the past of Harry.He is a special group of people whose daily existence mainly concentrates on money, wine, sex and writing. These transformations make the quest variant full of metaphorical and realistic indications. This story is therefore filled with the thoughts on human’s existence. It develops the theme that a person should neither waste the gifts he holds nor lead his life taking advantage of others.
Bibliography：
［1］Guerin, W.L., 2004, A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press
［2］Gunton,S.R., 1981, Contemporary Literary Criticism Volume 19. Michigan: Gale Research Company
［3］Jung,C.G., 1999, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Beijing: China Social Sciences Publishing House.
［4］杜剑雄、陈艳, 2007, 雪山上的来客—《乞力马扎罗的雪》面面观。科技信息(32):260-261
［5］姜晓梅，2003，英语小说名篇赏析。延吉：延边人民出版社
［6］李亚南、区林，2007，《乞力马扎罗山的雪》的底蕴解读。云南师范大学学报（5）：92-96
［7］肖谊, 1999, 戏剧效果与暗含诗意—论《乞力马扎罗山的雪》。湘潭师范学院学报(2):101-102
［8］张国申,2003, 死亡与升华—析海明威小说悲剧思想。外国文学(2):70-74
Key Words: The Snows of Kilimanjaro, quest，quest variant, archetype
1.Introduction
The Snows of Kilimanjaro, one of the famous short stories written by Ernest Hemingway, is about a regretful, wasted author named Harry who is lying on an African plain dying of gangrene. The story reflects Hemingway’s life-consciousness and interprets the post-war trauma experienced by “the lost generation” to some extent. Like many other writers, Hemingway adds something of strangeness in the literary conventions while following them.In this way he passes on and enlarges the literary conventions. And he creates a fresh quest variant which provides the traditional quest a counterpart to compare.
This short story is widely read and very popular in many countries around the world. In the story, Hemingway depicts Harry’s puzzlement about existence and his constant quest. He becomes the focus of many scholars’ attention. The key point for the selection of quest archetype is that the story reflects clearly the ideological picture in the postwar America and man’s puzzlement about existence and the constant quest.
My assumption is that the archetypal theory will be very helpful to analyze the quest plot. To illustrate this idea, the following paragraphs will attempt to analyze Harry’s constant quest experience in his life from the archetypal perspective, which will have great significance in thinking about the meaning of human’s existence today.
2.Literature Review
As a great literary figure, Ernest Hemingway is always the focus of critics’ attention. And his famous short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro is often studied by critics at home and broad.
2.1 International Studies
Harry died spiritually the day he traded his integrity for security, and here he is dying now with a gangrenous leg…. His gangrenous leg is token symbol of his moral gangrene as creative writer. Obversely put, writing is a struggle, an act of labor and pain…. But Harry never exerted himself, never tried because he feared he might fail….(Gunton, 1981:212).
2.2 Domestic Studies
In the story, Hemingway wants to reveal Harry’s quest for eternity. The square top of Kilimanjaro, the frozen carcass of a leopard and the snows of Kilimanjaro, and so on represent eternity. And eternity can be obtained in death. (Xiao Yi, 1999:102; Zhang Guoshen, 2003:72)
Harry is just like other people; he once had the quest for career, love, and also tried to achieve greatness. His memories of the cruel war, his experience and quest in other countries reflect Harry’s constant pursuit. He is eager to pursue the meaning of life. And the quest of the leopard appearing at the beginning of the text is a reflection of continuous quest of Harry and namely Hemingway in their life, shows that why writing is the lifeline of Harry and Hemingway and the quest comes to an end; eternity can be obtained only in constant pursuit and how the meaning of life is revealed when confronting death. (Li Yanan& Ou Lin, 2007:94)Harry’s interior monologue shows he has been pursuing his first love. He comes to Africa in quest for excellence in his writing (Du Jianxiong & Chen Yan, 2007:261).
The above-mentioned ideas about Harry emphasize his constant quest for eternity, career, love, and also excellence in life. However, I think these ideas are not all-round. Both Harry and Hemingway are of the “Lost Generation” of World War I who have to quest the meaning of life and rebuild their lives after being wounded in combat and seeing the horrors of war. This short story also reveals their puzzlement about existence and their spiritual quest. This paper analyzes the quest plot from the archetypal perspective.
3.Theoretic Framework and Critical Approaches
C.G.Jung was the developer of the term of archetype. He regarded collective unconscious as a deeper layer upon which personal unconscious rests. And the contents of collective unconscious are signified as archetype. Different from the contents of personal unconscious “which have at one time been conscious but which have disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed, the contents of the collective unconscious have never been in consciousness, and therefore have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to heredity.” Therefore, archetype in Jung’s understanding is the psychological heritage of human being. It refers to “universal images that have existed since the remotest times” or “definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere” (Jung, 1999:5, 42). In other words, archetype refers to those images or phenomena that appear frequently within a culture as well as everywhere in different cultures.
Northrop Frye (Guerin, 2004: 167) applied Jung’s theory of archetype in the filed of literature. He began to collect, sort out and analyze literary images or phenomena that frequently appears in literary works. They include all kinds of recurring narrative structures, imageries and characters modes. Frye regarded them as archetypes in literature. What he and especially the later archetypal critics did was to categorize them and use them to conduct their analysis of works of literary art. Jung once mentioned that: “There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution.” In literature, archetype is a narration as well as an expression of life and mind. There are surely no fewer archetypes in literature than that in daily life.
Among various archetypes in literature, quest is an important one. Frye once claimed,“The complete form of the romance is clearly the successful quest.”(Guerin, 2004:167) Joseph Campbell, another famous critic after Frye, even regarded quest as the archetypal outline plot of nearly all myths in all cultures. He thought that the quest archetype defined much of the literature in human history.
Quest stories in literary history are many, but two elements are essential for any quest. One is the hero; the other is the adventure. The hero contains common attributes like fate and background. Specifically speaking, they share similar birth, special weapon, supernatural help, self-proof, and incurable wound. Regarding to the adventure, Frye divided a quest into three parts: perilous journey, struggle, and the final exaltation of the hero. So a quest is a journey, full of so many troubles and difficulties that struggle is inescapably needed. Moreover, in a quest, the attributes a hero contains as well as the help from the supernatural finally render the adventure with a successful ending. These three parts constitutes a quest pattern. It is the basic plot structure of a traditional quest.
4.Discussion and Analysis
It is obvious that The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a story of questing. But the quest in this story is a little different from the traditional quest.
First, The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a story of human spiritual quest. This is human being’s quest for values. Does the leopard come close to the western summit of Kilimanjaro for a certain quest? Maybe different people have different ideas. We can think about it from Harry’s experience– the counterpart of image of the dead leopard. In the story, Harry is a person who could not find the meaning of life. The African safari was Harry’s attempt to put his life back on track. Harry 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.
Africa was where he had been happiest in the good
time of his life, so he had come out here to start again.
(Jiang Xiaomei, 2003:66)
But he eventually faces death because he is scratched on the leg by a thorn, and the infection becomes gangrenous. Here his leg is rotting away just as his life as a writer decayed due to his laziness. In fact, this is the inevitable result of the failure of Harry’s spiritual quest. This short story reveals man’s living situation at that time. He experienced the distressing post-war trauma. To some extent, his quest represents the journey of the spiritual quest of that generation.
The dead leopard is not only a simple image, and it is the entry points of narration in this story and has a profound meaning. The reader is familiar with the myth of the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard that tried to reach the climax of Kilimanjaro, known as the House of God. People like to think of heaven as some place joyful, elevated and cool to believe that a superior and better life awaits them where they can comfortably rest on God’s side. Therefore, the leopard’s perseverance, strength and courage enable it to attain heaven. In addition, the leopard suggests that its qualities can not be associated to Harry’s qualities since the latter lets himself carry by helicopter to the House of God as opposed to the beast which made its own way up. Here the leopard represents all that he has not accomplished. As we know that the leopard, being the fastest land animal has mastered his surroundings and accomplished greatness. Harry’s quest for excellence in his writing is shown throughout the story; this is directly correrlery to the great skill and dominance of the leopard of his kingdom. Harry strives to be like the leopard and accomplish greatness, but he fails. 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.
Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high,
and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit
is called the Masai “Ngaje Ngai,” the house of God. Close to the
western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard.
No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at the altitude.
(Jiang Xiaomei, 2003:58)
Hemingway uses the leopard in the epigram at the beginning of the story to represent what Harry would like to be, someone with strength, courage and passion. The leopard is found at the top of the mountain and why it went there is a mystery. In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” the mountain Kilimanjaro itself represents the heights of art: the savanna is humid, rotting, hot, and teeming with life, while the mountain peak is clean, arid, and pure. And it also represents the afterlife, a place of inspiration that Harry can go to achieve the characteristics of the leopard. The primary question is whether Harry’s journey into the peak of the mountain represents transcendence. Many critics have argued that it does. On a symbolic level, then, Harry’s festering leg represents his talent, that is rotting due to a lack of understanding, and the leopard of the story’s epigraph represents Harry himself: he scaled the heights only to die there.
Second, Harry’s quest for love, pleasure and also he tries to achieve greatness in life. He intends to write something (the mental writing of the flashbacks) in his painful stupor. In the italicized flashbacks, we see Harry as he was in his earlier life, especially in Paris, where he lived in bohemian poverty and devoted his energies to writing. But he consistently regrets leaving that behind. He gave up, in a sense, and began spending his time drinking,raveling, hunting, and chasing rich women. He became “what he despised,” as the narrator says.
And he had chosen to make his living with something
else instead of a pen or a pencil. (Jiang Xiaomei, 2003:68)
He had traded it for security, for comfort too, there was
no denying that, and for what else? (Jiang Xiaomei, 2003:70)
But in the flashback sections, Harry faces his life. His flashbacks show the reader that he has had an exciting and well-travelled life, but that he is also haunted by his memories of World War I. He served in the U.S. Army in that war and saw combat on the Eastern front, in the Balkans, and Austria. The violence and death that he saw there come back to him as his rotting leg tells him that he is about to die. Harry’s past is not all negative. He is a writer, and in his flashbacks he thinks about his vocation and about all of the stories he wanted to write that he never took the time to begin. He has spent time in Paris with the artists and writers who lived there in the 1920s and is familiar with the Place de la Contrescarpe, a popular bohemian locale of the time. His flashbacks also show that he is an experienced outdoorsman. Hemingway also describes the various failure and regret issues the main characters must examine: Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well (Jiang Xiaomei, 2003:60). Well, he would never fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now. Harry’s struggle concerns things he failed to complete.
Harry had been a promising young writer who fell in with a rich crowd because, he told himself, he wanted to write about them. “He had had his life and it was over and then he went living it again with different people and more money,” the narrator states. However, he was seduced by their luxuries and allowed those luxuries to distract him from his true calling. “Each day of not writing,” the narrator continues, “of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.” To purge himself of this luxury and to remind himself of the hardships that drove him to his best work, he and his wife took this safari “with the minimum of comfort” so that “in some way he could work the fat off his soul the way a fighter went into the mountains to work and train in order to burn it out of his body.”
In quest variant, the plot structure of the traditional quest is transformed into another structure of mental struggle. The mental struggle embodies itself mainly in Harry’s fragmented past. 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”
…ahead, 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. (Jiang Xiaomei, 2003:88)
The ending of their quests is also metaphorical. The plot structure of the quest variant is changed into mental struggle and an inevitable failure at the end. And the questing process is also a metaphor of human’s existence, and the object that the quest aims to seek is a metaphor of the meaning or values that human being seeks in his existence.
In this thesis, there are still some points that are open to discuss and needs improvement. Firstly, the limited access to original materials makes me very difficult and impossible to get every necessary book. So some quotations are quoted from books in Chinese and translated by myself. Secondly, as a Chinese who has not experienced the existential cultural movement in western developed countries, my understanding of it is impossible to be completely precise. Some inaccuracy is thus doomed. And the profound analysis is never exhausted. So this paper is far from completing its mission. More efforts are still needed to the exploration of the quest concerning archetypal theory.
5.Conclusion
Ernest Hemingway expressed his notion of life and happiness in his short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro. In fact, in this short story, Hemingway explores the protagonist’s constant quest, emphasizes the animal symbolism and represents Sisyphus of the ancient Greek mythology by his opposite to suggest that perseverance is the key to happiness. Hemingway changes archetypal pattern into journey, clues and an uncertain ending. Besides this, in plots related to quest, he depicts the past of Harry.He is a special group of people whose daily existence mainly concentrates on money, wine, sex and writing. These transformations make the quest variant full of metaphorical and realistic indications. This story is therefore filled with the thoughts on human’s existence. It develops the theme that a person should neither waste the gifts he holds nor lead his life taking advantage of others.
Bibliography：
［1］Guerin, W.L., 2004, A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press
［2］Gunton,S.R., 1981, Contemporary Literary Criticism Volume 19. Michigan: Gale Research Company
［3］Jung,C.G., 1999, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Beijing: China Social Sciences Publishing House.
［4］杜剑雄、陈艳, 2007, 雪山上的来客—《乞力马扎罗的雪》面面观。科技信息(32):260-261
［5］姜晓梅，2003，英语小说名篇赏析。延吉：延边人民出版社
［6］李亚南、区林，2007，《乞力马扎罗山的雪》的底蕴解读。云南师范大学学报（5）：92-96
［7］肖谊, 1999, 戏剧效果与暗含诗意—论《乞力马扎罗山的雪》。湘潭师范学院学报(2):101-102
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