Most impressively dramatic [in The Snow Leopard] is Matthiessen's account of [his] passage through the Himalayas. In images that are intensely kinesthetic as well as visual, he recreates its magnificent vistas and terrors, its unspeakable otherness and sublimity. Finally, The Snow Leopard is such a mixture of various things as to make it difficult to name its literary kind. However, there is no doubt that it is profoundly unified in the day-to-day tribulations and wonders of the expedition and in Matthiessen's sensibility—the poetry of voice, his intelligent simplicity, and his obsessions.
In regard to the obsessions, The Snow Leopard is reminiscent of Walden and The Pilgrim's Progress where the oppressive complexities of intimate human connections are also violently repudiated in a determination to see snow leopards. For this, Matthiessen risked his life and subjected himself to enormous discomfort and pain. (p. 33)
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