Comment on the narrative style of Hemingway

One of the principal features of Ernest Hemingway is the degree to which he makes use of
writings that actively pursue questions of life and death of the self involved in making and
disseminating images of the self.
The Snows of Kilimanjaro’s primary achievement, lay in producing the appearance of
someone thinking. Harry’s monologue is like writing built on the imaginative power that
resides in the disorders. For Harry’s thoughts are built on Hemingway’s balanced and
economic sentences. In this regard, both set themselves against the elegant elaborations of
Fitzgerald, referred to later in the story as the ‘’Wretched’’ Julian.
One meaning is discoverable in the balance and imbalance in the sentences and another is
made in the relation between the two. Harry has a revisionist habit. Initially he blames his
wife Helen for his trouble in the words ‘’this good, this rich bitch, this kindly caretaker and
destroyer.’’ However, the sentences that follow back-paddle and begin to revise the first
assertion, admitting that Harry has sought his own destruction in the line “He has destroyed
his talent by not using it,’’ which altogether present Harry’s masculine illusions of control.
Hemingway uses this technique to help him build sentences that unite powerfully compacted
and opposing forces and ideas.
Harry’s hatred, fear and misunderstanding of women stems from capitalism’s fierce
differentiation of masculine and feminine experience. Hemingway’s narrative escalated from
a narrow concern for his style and meaning of the representation of men and women to a
rumination on the ironies buried deep in the political unconsciousness of the twentieth-
century America.