SOURCE: "The Short Stories," in The Narrative Pattern in Ernest Hemingway's Fiction, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971, pp. 80-120.

In the following excerpt, Nahal examines the tension between life and death in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" was first published in 1936. By then Hemingway was moving slowly to the realization that the larger life of the universe must include an intuitive awareness of the mystery of Death; as early as 1932, in Death in the Afternoon he had commented on it. For the cosmic order of the universe could be maintained only through as powerful a balancing force on the other side as life on this one. Here Hemingway goes very close to the Christian mysticism of Boehme, where duality is seen at the center of everything. In the latter half of his creative career, Hemingway concerned himself with death in an increasingly intense fashion. Across the...