The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself: Difference between revisions

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 his chest” {{sfn|Scribner|2003|pp=25}}. Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.
-Then,with a jolt,we realize the truth
+Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure
+white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry.
+The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—
+where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride
+to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart {{sfn|Scribner|2003|28}}).
+What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the
+beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this
+skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus
+draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The
+epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that
+altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the
+cat’s presence” {{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|pp=224}}. Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write” {{sfn|stoltzfus|2005|pp=224}}. Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.
+How do we reconcile the
 . . .