What is the theme of death in The Snows of Kilimanjaro?

As the story of an imminent death, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is suffused not only with images of death but also with a pervading sense of death's presence. The story begins with death—"it's painless," Harry says in the first line, referring to his oncoming demise—and ends with the ironic comparison of the woman's heart beating loudly and the stillness of Harry's lifeless body. Death is symbolically figured both as the pristine whiteness of the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro and as the creeping, filthy hyena that lurks outside of Harry's tent.

Harry's attitude toward his death wavers during the story. At first, he puts up a brave and almost cavalier front, telling his wife that he does not care about his death and is resigned to it. He almost seems to be trying to anger her, knowing that she cares about him and that he can hurt her by seeming not to be bothered by death's imminence. But in the italicized sections of the story, Harry's bravado disappears, and he slips into the regret of a man who knows he is dying but who rues the fact that he has not accomplished what he wanted to accomplish. The gangrenous rot that is taking his leg metamorphoses, in his mind, into the poetry that he never wrote: "I'm full of poetry now. Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry."

Hemingway brings death into the story largely by the use of symbolism. The woman leaves the camp to go kill an animal, going out of his sight because (the narrator states) she does not want to disturb the wildlife. However, she clearly does not want to kill something in plain sight of her dying husband. The hyena, an animal that feeds on carcasses, skulks around the camp, a prefiguration of the rotting death that Harry fears. Even the relationship between Harry and his wife is a symbol of his imminent end: he says that the quarrelling had "killed what they had together."

But when death comes it is not rotten and lingering and painful. Rather, it is transcendent. Harry slips into a reverie in which he hallucinates that his friend Compton arrives in an airplane to take him to find medical care. As the plane takes off, it passes by the blinding white summit of Kilimanjaro. As Harry passes this image, the reader is reminded of the epigraph of the story, in which Hemingway says that "close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeing at that altitude." Harry seems to have found something, though: a release from his earthly problems.