Voices, images, symbols and theme in the snows of KilimanjaroThe Snows of Kilimanjaro, a short story by Ernest Hemingway, is a brilliant study of the last hours of a man before death. The story centers on Harry and his wife, waiting for a plane to come and take him to a doctor or hospital. Thus begins a flow of passages that takes the reader alongside Harry as he drifts in and out of consciousness, passing from one life to the next. The obvious theme is death and dying, but the main theme is Harry's return to his past and his journey to the present. Hemingway uses animal imagery in the story to reflect the theme of agony and to show two distinct sides of Harry and his character. pass from life to death. The story opens with Harry discussing his dying leg and the smell created by the infection or gangrene. He thinks about the three big birds (vultures) waiting on the horizon. “Look at them,” he said. “Now, is it the sight or the smell that brings them like this?” His use of adjectives to describe the birds and their expectation of his death projects a sense of death and sets the tone of the story, using words such as "obscene", "shadow" and "veil" to correlate the emergence of the birds with the ascension of death. "...as he looked beyond the shadows, onto the glare of the plane, three of the great birds were crouching obscenely, while in the sky a dozen more were sailing, creating swift shadows as they pass." His introduction of various animals that are generally associated with death and dying in the story reproduce at regular intervals the passing phases of the dying process. "They have been there since they looked beyond the shadows onto the glare of the plane. There were three of the big birds crouching, obs.... middle of paper...... they were outside..” Snows of Kilimanjaro is a powerful, beautifully written story of one man's journey from life to death. It's a step-by-step process, with each step brilliantly depicted in a short period of time. "He came even closer to him and now he couldn't talk to him, and when he saw that he couldn't talk, he came a little closer, and now he tried to send him away without speaking , but he moved closer to him so all the weight was on his chest, and as long as he was crouching there, he could neither move nor speak. " At the end of the story, the animal. reappears, this time serving as a call for Harry's death. "At that moment, the hyena stopped moaning in the night and began to make a strange, human-like sound, almost crying. The woman heard it and stirred worriedly." Works Cited: Hemingway, Ernest. “The snows of Kilimanjaro.” Baym, et al.. 2: 1687-1704.