The Snows of Kilimanjaro

A typical Hemingway work full of nostalgia and grief for a life not lived to its fullest. One assumes nothing was good enough for Hemingway as, by most people’s standards, he lived a very full life. But a great deal of his work is pre-occupied with a sense of a lack of fulfilment and frustration. There is an overhanging smell of death as the main character slowly succumbs to gangrene, and of course, foreshadowing Hemingway’s suicide many years later.
Melancholy runs throughout the entire story with only the ending bringing a sense of hope and relief. The writer in the story has spent his life marrying rich women to survive and, as such, didn’t have time to become the great writer he believes himself to be.
As gangrene takes over his body he draws a parallel between his physical condition and his mental state. “I’m full of poetry now. Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry.”