What has not been noticed about "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is how it is designed. Scenes of external reality alternate with juxtaposed scenes of internal monologue, reminiscences of Harry's past life that Harry failed to utilize as writer. These cutbacks—they are set into italics—are not dreams, but rather they are recollected reality; the point is that they relate thematically. They are not irresponsible reminiscences. They are relevant in that they elicit, albeit obliquely, one motif or another relating to the plight of the protagonist. The narrative progression moves now forward in present reality and now backward to recollected reality.

The story is about an artist—or potential artist—who 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…. That he recollects his fragmented past, experiences he failed to recreate into formed literary works, that he recollects all that he has missed out on as potential artist, evokes the ironical poignancy of Harry's situation. What's painful about his present plight is just that. "Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either."… (pp. 193-94)

It is the characteristic Hemingway division and conflict between internal code or conscience and an external and meretricious code of manners or social front…. (p. 194)

[The construction of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" depends on] … the various parts being related not logically but psychologically:

That was one story he had saved to write. He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written one. Why?

              'You tell them why,' he said.
              'Why what, dear?'
              'Why nothing.'

The narrative shifts from recollections, from the mind of Harry, back to reality; here the transposition is clearly managed by the linked "Why?" Harry's memoried experiences furnish a kind of scrapbook of images which Harry had intended to recast into stories; they are all fragments, disjointed episodes, not yet organized into dramatic wholes because Harry never converted them into works of art. They are the unformed life he failed to form. Harry has not organized them, but Hemingway has.

While their sequence is seemingly haphazard, these internal monologues progress toward the climactic and final image of Williamson who was hit by a German bomb as he crawled through the trench's protective wire, "with a flare lighting him up and his bowels spilled out into the wire, so when they brought him in, alive, they had to cut him loose. Shoot me, Harry. For Christ sake shoot me." It is as though Williamson's plea were Harry's own death-wish, and almost immediately subsequent to this image of death-by-agony Harry himself dies—in contrast to Williamson, however, Harry does not die in agony. When "the weight went from his chest,"… Harry dies in his sleep. "It was morning and had been morning for some time and he heard the plane." Harry at the moment of his dying dreams that Compton comes to take him away by plane. "It was difficult getting him in, but once in he lay back in the leather seat, and the leg was stuck straight out to one side of the seat where Compton sat." All of this dream episode is set in Roman type so as to distinguish it from the italicized passages of Harry's recollections of the past; they are not dreams. The transition from reality to dream is as adroitly managed here as in Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," Hemingway's device deriving from Bierce's famous story. In both stories the ending returns us to that point in the narrative where the death-dream began. (pp. 195-96)

Caroline Gordon in the textbook anthology The House of Fiction (1950) opines that Hemingway "has made no provision for the climax of his symbolic action. Our attention is not called to the snow-covered peaks of Kilimanjaro until the end of the story; as a result we do not feel that sense of recognition and inevitability which help to make a katharsis." At the end of Harry's dream, during which the perspective is from the airplane with images evoking a sense of Harry's belated nostalgic love for life, "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 that was where he was going."… But he isn't going there, not at all; because he has not earned admission to the heights, admission to "the House of God," as the western summit of Kilimanjaro is called.

Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and it is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai 'Ngàje Ngài,' 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 that altitude.

The story opens with this italicized passage, which I presume is one of Harry's recollections since all his other recollections are likewise italicized passages. So, then, the symbol is not "something the writer has tacked on" (contra Caroline Gordon); but rather it is an integral part of the story. "He uses the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro as the symbol of death, but the symbolism … is not part of the action and therefore does not operate as a controlling image…." She damns the story as a magnificent failure, whereas I see it as a magnificent success.

Harry's "vision" of Kilimanjaro in his death-dream returns us at the end to the opening passage and shapes the whole in circular form. Immediately following that italicized image of the Kilimanjaro summit, which in effect is a riddle to be unriddled, Harry says: "The marvellous thing is that it is painless." But it wasn't painless for that leopard to ascend the summit, an ascent which Harry never attempted; he has attained an immortality which Harry never earned. The symbol is far more than simply a symbol of death. That leopard exceeded the nature and aspirations of his kind: "No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude." Well, he wasn't seeking immortality, being only a dumb beast; but he got just that in attaining the heights, admission to "the House of God."

In contrast to the noble leopard is the hyena which Harry imagines as death. Death "like a hyena"—but now suddenly shapeless, crouches and weighs down on his chest. "'You've got a hell of a breath,' he told it. 'You stinking bastard'."… In addressing the stinking hyena Harry is addressing himself; Hyena Harry—a cowardly and carnivorous beast. (pp. 196-97)

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro," says our biased critic, "lacks tonal and symbolic unity," but a close reading disproves that claim. "Its three planes of action, the man's intercourse with his wife, his communings with his soul, and the background of Enveloping Action, the mysterious Dark Continent, are never integrated." Well, let us examine what's what. (p. 198)

All six sections of italicized recollections present a death scene and link thus with the plight of the protagonist. Again, actions of betrayal are recurrent—in monologues number 2, 3, 4, and 5. To say that "Our attention is not called to the snow-covered peaks of Kilimanjaro until the end of the story" is to ignore these multiple interrelationships of recollected scenes with their recurrent motifs of death, deception, betrayal, and flight. The final death-dream is itself a scene of flight, flight from the Dark Continent to the House of God. The leopard made it there, but not Harry. To say that the leopard symbolism "is not part of the action and therefore does not operate as a controlling image" is to ignore the whole substance of Harry's recollected incidents; they furnish obliquely linked analogies with Harry himself and thematically they are counterpointed against the opening image of the leopard dead in the snows of Kilimanjaro's summit. Man betrays man; only the leopard is true. That opening image of the miraculous leopard operates, by my reading, as controlling and focal symbol. Don't underrate Hemingway! (p. 199)