Ernest Hemingway Research Paper

Hemingway's Death

Ernest Hemingway, an early twentieth century writer, was obsessed with death. It is no secret he committed suicide when he was only sixty. One can infer that death was a lot on his mind. Not only because of his suicide either. Death was a motif in many of his stories, including the Snows of Kilimanjaro, his most famous tale on the subject. Harry, the protagonist, is an adventurer just like Ernest Hemingway, except Harry died of a mundane infection instead of getting gunned down in a battle, or some such glorious death. Harry, as he dies, reflects on his life and reflects on everything he wished he could have done but did not.

Hemingway was revolutionary in the literary world because he cut out all the fluff of writing.

Harry think s about all the ways death takes his form. Usually when people think of death, they picture a skeleton in a cloak carrying a scythe. A scary thing. "Never believe that of a scythe and a skull, it can be two bicycle policemen as easily, or be a bird" (2223). Harry expresses how death does not have to be something intimidating, like a skull; it can be something simple and ordinary.

This means death can strike him at any time, and any place, and when it does,

Throughout the story, the hyena makes itself known, by growling and making noise, constantly reminding Harry that he is going to die. Death is this incessant entity knocking on the door until, eventually, you let it in.

Ernest Hemingway used his talent as a writer to put the readers through what he might have went through in his life or the way he perceives passing away in his own eyes. Hemingway's life-like prose on death certainly convince the reader the characters he imagines are really dying and not simply ending in the story. The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a great example of Hemingway's idea of death, but it is not the only one. In A Farewell to Arms a group of men attempting to protect a bridge get holed up in a cave and watch each other starve to death. In The Old Man and The Sea, the protagonist tenaciously holds on to his rod as a giant fish carries him across the ocean to his near death; even when the old man is convinced he is going to die, and thinks if anybody at his village will miss him, he continues to hold onto the fish, and in the moments he contemplates death, the reader is placed in that small dinghy with him, as if they are dying alongside the old man. In each of these stories, Hemingway uses different characters in different problems to express death. Hemingway was not a "happily-ever-after" type of