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摘 要:欧内斯特·海明威认为他所写的《乞力马扎罗的雪》是他最好的作品之一。本文从象征主义来阐释这篇短篇小说中的死亡意象。本文将从哈里的生坏疽的腿,威廉逊的死,乞力马扎罗的雪,豹子,鬣狗五部分的象征来分析这篇小说中的死亡意象。这样,我们会客观而且全面地理解这个意象。
关键词:象征主义;死亡意象;乞力马扎罗的雪
1、Introduction
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. It is also collected together with other stories as The Snows of Kilimanjaro collection. Considered by Hemingway himself to be one of his finest stories, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was first published in Esquire in 1936 and then republished in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories (1938).
The story centers on the memories of a writer named Harry who is on safari in Africa. He develops an infected wound from a thorn puncture, and lies awaiting his slow death. This loss of physical capability causes him to look inside himself—at his memories of the past years, and how little he has actually accomplished in his writing. He realizes that although he has seen and experienced many wonderful and astonishing things during his life, he had never made a record of the events; his status as a writer is contradicted by his reluctance to actually write. He also quarrels with the woman with him, blaming her for his living decadently and forgetting his failure to write of what really matters to him, namely his experiences among poor and “interesting” people, not the predictable upper class crowd he has fallen in with lately. Thus he dies, having lived through so much and yet having lived only for the moment, with no regard to the future. In a dream he sees a plane coming to get him and take him to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro.
This thesis mainly focuses on the analysis the dead image in the short story from Symbolism. In this paper, this dead image will be analyzed from the symbols of Harry’s gangrenous leg, Williamson’s death, the snows of Kilimanjaro, the leopard, and the hyena. In this way, we can have an objective and all round understanding of this image.
2、Literature review
2.1 International study
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, which Hemingway considered his finest short story, is much better known than “The Capital of the world.” Hemingway’s formal problem in the story was to find a means of getting into Harry’s past through long internal monologues without destroying the structure of the present action. By plunging into the stream of consciousness, Hemingway was led to duplicate cinematic techniques used earlier by Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Faulkner.[]
What has not been noticed about “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is how it is designed. Scenes of external reality alternate with juxtaposed scenes of internal monologue, reminiscences of Harry’s past life that Harry failed to utilize as writer.[]
In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, the writer Harry brought about by a physical gangrene that parallels his moral rot. He has married Helen, an extremely wealthy woman, and let his talent go to seed. Harry knows that what has happened is no one’s fault but his own.[]
2.2 Domestic study
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is a short story rich in symbolism. Hemingway endows his ordinary people and things with symbolic meanings such as a wife, a leopard, a hyena, the snow-covered mountain and the plain and thus brings to sharp contrast between two sets of values: a real life and a living death. All the symbols serve the work so well that the theme is well deepened and the work achieves great significance both in literary terms and social terms.[]
Through the function of metaphor --- rhetoric, linguistic and cognitive function of it in Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro, we can see the author’s attitude and comprehension toward life. Trough it, we can also see the author’s concise and implicit characteristics which form the author’s style of “Iceberg”.[]
2.3 Research question
This thesis mainly focuses on the analysis the dead image in the short story from Symbolism. In this paper, this dead image will be analyzed from the symbols of Harry’s gangrenous leg, Williamson’s death, the snows of Kilimanjaro, the leopard, and the hyena. In this way, we can have an objective and all round understanding of this image.
3、Theoretical framework and critical approach ——symbolism
The formalistic approach, as we use the term in this book, emphasizes the manner of reading literature that was given its special dimensions and emphases by English and American critics in the first two- thirds of the twentieth century.
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas of concept.[] Symbol means an act, a person, a thing, or a spectacle that stands for something else, usually something less palpable than the named symbol. The relationship between the symbol and its referent is not often one of simple equivalence. Symbolists tend to avoid any direct statement of meaning. Instead, they work through emotionally powerful symbols that suggest meaning and mood.[] Symbols may sometimes remain within the work, as it were; but it is the nature of symbols to have extensional possibilities, to open out to the world beyond the art object itself. When meaning and value outside the work of literature are the real purpose of the symbol, some formalistic critics may find fault with the work. On the other hand, such a restriction may be well one of the more limiting concerns of the New Critics, and we take the cautious position that even in a formalistic reading we must go sometimes beyond the pure aestheticism of the work in itself to the extended meaning of work as suggested by its symbols. []Symbol is a way of using something integral to the work to reach beyond the work and engage the world of value outside the work.[]
4、Analysis
4.1 Harry’s gangrenous leg
His gangrenous leg is token symbol of his moral gangrene as creative writer, and his real life has over.
The story is about an artist--- or potential artist--- who died spiritually the day he traded his integrity for security, and here he is dying now with a gangrenous leg. His gangrenous leg is token symbol of his moral gangrene as creative writer.
In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, the writer Harry brought about by a physical gangrene that parallels his moral rot. He has married Helen, an extremely wealthy woman, and let his talent go to seed. Harry knows that what has happened is no one’s fault but his own.[]
The construction of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” depends on the various parts being related not logically but psychologically: “That was one’s story he had saved to write. He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written one. Why? ‘You tell them why,’ he said. ‘Why what, dear?’ ‘Why nothing.’” 12 [p.49]The narrative shifts from recollections, from the mind of Harry, back to reality; here the transposition is clearly managed by the linked “Why?” Harry’s memoried experiences furnish a kind of scrapbook to images which Harry had intended to recast into stories; they are all fragments, disjointed episodes, not yet organized into dramatic wholes because Harry never converted them into works of art. They are the unformed life he failed to form. Harry has not organized them
4.2 Willimson’s death
Harry’s own death-wish, in contrast to Williamson, Harry does not die in agony.
While their sequence is seemingly haphazard these internal monologues progress toward the climactic and final image of Williamson who was hit by a German bomb as he crawled through the trench’s protective wire, “with a flare lighting him up and his bowels spilled out into the wire, so when they brought him in, alive, they had to cut him loose. Shoot me, Harry. For Christ sake shoot me.” It is as though Williamson’s plea, were Harry’s own death-wish, and almost immediately subsequent to this image of death-by-agony Harry himself dies --- in contrast to Williamson, however, Harry does not die in agony. When “the weight went from his chest,” Harry dies in his sleep. “It was morning and had been morning for some time and he heard the plane.” Harry at the moment of his dying dreams the Compton comes to take him away by plane. “It was difficult getting him in, but once in he lay back in the leather seat, and the leg was stuck straight out to one side of the seat where Compton sat.” All of this dream episode is set in Roman type so as to distinguish it from the italicized passages of Harry’s recollections of the past; they are not dreams. The transition from reality to dream is as adroitly managed here as in Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Hemingway’s device deriving from Bierce’s famous story. In both stories the ending returns use to that point in narrative where the death-dream began.
4.3 The Snows of Kilimanjaro
The snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro is the symbol of death.
“Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and it is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called Masai “Ngie Ngai,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.”
The story opens with this italicized passage, which is one of Harry’s recollections since all his other recollections are likewise italicized passages. So, then, the symbol is not “something the writer has tacked on”; but rather it is an integral part of the story. “He uses the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro as the symbol of death, but the symbolism is not part of the action and therefore does not operate as a controlling image.” Gordon damns the story as a magnificent failure, whereas it as a magnificent success.
Caroling Gordon in the textbook anthology The House of Fiction (1950) opines that Hemingway “has made no provision for the climax of his symbolic action. Our attention is not called to the snow–covered peaks of Kilimanjaro until the end of the story; as a result we do not feel that sense of recognition and inevitability which help to make a kathasis.” []
4.4 The leopard
The leopard is not only a symbol of death, but also the symbol of Harry’s dream to seek “the House of God”.
“Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.”12[p.39]
Harry’s “vision” of Kilimanjaro in his death-dream returns us at the end to the opening passage and shapes the whole in circular form. Immediately following that italicized image of the Kilimanjaro summit, which in effect is a riddle to be unriddled, Harry says: “The marvelous thing is that it is painless.” But it wasn’t painless for that leopard to ascend the summit, an ascent which Harry never attempted, he was attainted an immortality which Harry never earned. The symbol is far more than simply a symbol of death. That leopard exceeded the nature and aspirations of his kind: “no one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.”
Well, the leopard wasn’t seeking immortality, being only a dumb beast; but he got just that in attaining the heights, admission to “the House of God”.
5. Conclusion
5.1 Main statement
In this paper, this dead image will be analyzed from Symbolism. Harry’s gangrenous leg is token symbol of his moral gangrene as creative writer, and his real life has over. Harry’s own death-wish, in contrast to Williamson, Harry does not die in agony. The snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro is the symbol of death. The leopard is not only a symbol of death, but also the symbol to seek “the House of God”. In contrast to the noble leopard, the hyena is the symbol of death which Harry imagines.
5.2 Significance
In theory, Symbol is a way of using something integral to the work to reach beyond the work and engage the world of value outside the work. The relationship between the symbol and its referent is not often one of simple equivalence. Symbolists tend to avoid any direct statement of meaning. Instead, they work through emotionally powerful symbols that suggest meaning and mood.
In practice, through the function of symbolism in Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro, we can see the author’s attitude and comprehension toward life. Trough it, we can also see the author’s concise and implicit characteristics which form the author’s style of “Iceberg”. Hemingway avoids any direct statement of meaning. Instead, he works through emotionally powerful symbols that suggest meaning and mood. So the short story has more significance.
5.3 Limitation
In the paper, many italicized passages are not analyzed from symbolism, for example, the plain. “The cot the man lay on was in the wide shade of a mimosa tree and as he looked out past the shade onto the glare of the plain there were three of the big birds squatted obscenely, while in the sky a dozen more sailed, making quick-moving shadows as they passed.” The plain, which is stifling land, is a symbol of degenerate life which is Harry’s life.
Bibliography:
[1]Edward Murray, “Ernest Hemingway—Cinematic Strcture in Fiction and Problems in Adaptation,” in his The Cinematic Imagination:Writers and the Motion Pictures, Ungar, 1972, pp218-43.
[2]Robert W.Stallman, “A New Reading of‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’” in his The House That JamesBuilt and Other Literary Studies,Ohio University Press,1961, pp 193-99.
[3]Malcolm Cowley,“Hemingway’s Novel Has the Rich Simplicity of a Classic”, in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, September 7, 1952. pp344-346.
[4]李忠华,浅谈《乞力马扎罗的雪》中的象征,解放军外国语学院学报,第23卷第3期,2000年5月,P78-81.
[5]龚从贵,漫淡《乞力马扎罗的雪》的隐喻性,安徽工业大学学报社会科学版,第20卷第5期2003年9月,p107-109.
关键词:象征主义;死亡意象;乞力马扎罗的雪
1、Introduction
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. It is also collected together with other stories as The Snows of Kilimanjaro collection. Considered by Hemingway himself to be one of his finest stories, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was first published in Esquire in 1936 and then republished in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories (1938).
The story centers on the memories of a writer named Harry who is on safari in Africa. He develops an infected wound from a thorn puncture, and lies awaiting his slow death. This loss of physical capability causes him to look inside himself—at his memories of the past years, and how little he has actually accomplished in his writing. He realizes that although he has seen and experienced many wonderful and astonishing things during his life, he had never made a record of the events; his status as a writer is contradicted by his reluctance to actually write. He also quarrels with the woman with him, blaming her for his living decadently and forgetting his failure to write of what really matters to him, namely his experiences among poor and “interesting” people, not the predictable upper class crowd he has fallen in with lately. Thus he dies, having lived through so much and yet having lived only for the moment, with no regard to the future. In a dream he sees a plane coming to get him and take him to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro.
This thesis mainly focuses on the analysis the dead image in the short story from Symbolism. In this paper, this dead image will be analyzed from the symbols of Harry’s gangrenous leg, Williamson’s death, the snows of Kilimanjaro, the leopard, and the hyena. In this way, we can have an objective and all round understanding of this image.
2、Literature review
2.1 International study
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, which Hemingway considered his finest short story, is much better known than “The Capital of the world.” Hemingway’s formal problem in the story was to find a means of getting into Harry’s past through long internal monologues without destroying the structure of the present action. By plunging into the stream of consciousness, Hemingway was led to duplicate cinematic techniques used earlier by Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Faulkner.[]
What has not been noticed about “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is how it is designed. Scenes of external reality alternate with juxtaposed scenes of internal monologue, reminiscences of Harry’s past life that Harry failed to utilize as writer.[]
In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, the writer Harry brought about by a physical gangrene that parallels his moral rot. He has married Helen, an extremely wealthy woman, and let his talent go to seed. Harry knows that what has happened is no one’s fault but his own.[]
2.2 Domestic study
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is a short story rich in symbolism. Hemingway endows his ordinary people and things with symbolic meanings such as a wife, a leopard, a hyena, the snow-covered mountain and the plain and thus brings to sharp contrast between two sets of values: a real life and a living death. All the symbols serve the work so well that the theme is well deepened and the work achieves great significance both in literary terms and social terms.[]
Through the function of metaphor --- rhetoric, linguistic and cognitive function of it in Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro, we can see the author’s attitude and comprehension toward life. Trough it, we can also see the author’s concise and implicit characteristics which form the author’s style of “Iceberg”.[]
2.3 Research question
This thesis mainly focuses on the analysis the dead image in the short story from Symbolism. In this paper, this dead image will be analyzed from the symbols of Harry’s gangrenous leg, Williamson’s death, the snows of Kilimanjaro, the leopard, and the hyena. In this way, we can have an objective and all round understanding of this image.
3、Theoretical framework and critical approach ——symbolism
The formalistic approach, as we use the term in this book, emphasizes the manner of reading literature that was given its special dimensions and emphases by English and American critics in the first two- thirds of the twentieth century.
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas of concept.[] Symbol means an act, a person, a thing, or a spectacle that stands for something else, usually something less palpable than the named symbol. The relationship between the symbol and its referent is not often one of simple equivalence. Symbolists tend to avoid any direct statement of meaning. Instead, they work through emotionally powerful symbols that suggest meaning and mood.[] Symbols may sometimes remain within the work, as it were; but it is the nature of symbols to have extensional possibilities, to open out to the world beyond the art object itself. When meaning and value outside the work of literature are the real purpose of the symbol, some formalistic critics may find fault with the work. On the other hand, such a restriction may be well one of the more limiting concerns of the New Critics, and we take the cautious position that even in a formalistic reading we must go sometimes beyond the pure aestheticism of the work in itself to the extended meaning of work as suggested by its symbols. []Symbol is a way of using something integral to the work to reach beyond the work and engage the world of value outside the work.[]
4、Analysis
4.1 Harry’s gangrenous leg
His gangrenous leg is token symbol of his moral gangrene as creative writer, and his real life has over.
The story is about an artist--- or potential artist--- who died spiritually the day he traded his integrity for security, and here he is dying now with a gangrenous leg. His gangrenous leg is token symbol of his moral gangrene as creative writer.
In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, the writer Harry brought about by a physical gangrene that parallels his moral rot. He has married Helen, an extremely wealthy woman, and let his talent go to seed. Harry knows that what has happened is no one’s fault but his own.[]
The construction of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” depends on the various parts being related not logically but psychologically: “That was one’s story he had saved to write. He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written one. Why? ‘You tell them why,’ he said. ‘Why what, dear?’ ‘Why nothing.’” 12 [p.49]The narrative shifts from recollections, from the mind of Harry, back to reality; here the transposition is clearly managed by the linked “Why?” Harry’s memoried experiences furnish a kind of scrapbook to images which Harry had intended to recast into stories; they are all fragments, disjointed episodes, not yet organized into dramatic wholes because Harry never converted them into works of art. They are the unformed life he failed to form. Harry has not organized them
4.2 Willimson’s death
Harry’s own death-wish, in contrast to Williamson, Harry does not die in agony.
While their sequence is seemingly haphazard these internal monologues progress toward the climactic and final image of Williamson who was hit by a German bomb as he crawled through the trench’s protective wire, “with a flare lighting him up and his bowels spilled out into the wire, so when they brought him in, alive, they had to cut him loose. Shoot me, Harry. For Christ sake shoot me.” It is as though Williamson’s plea, were Harry’s own death-wish, and almost immediately subsequent to this image of death-by-agony Harry himself dies --- in contrast to Williamson, however, Harry does not die in agony. When “the weight went from his chest,” Harry dies in his sleep. “It was morning and had been morning for some time and he heard the plane.” Harry at the moment of his dying dreams the Compton comes to take him away by plane. “It was difficult getting him in, but once in he lay back in the leather seat, and the leg was stuck straight out to one side of the seat where Compton sat.” All of this dream episode is set in Roman type so as to distinguish it from the italicized passages of Harry’s recollections of the past; they are not dreams. The transition from reality to dream is as adroitly managed here as in Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Hemingway’s device deriving from Bierce’s famous story. In both stories the ending returns use to that point in narrative where the death-dream began.
4.3 The Snows of Kilimanjaro
The snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro is the symbol of death.
“Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and it is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called Masai “Ngie Ngai,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.”
The story opens with this italicized passage, which is one of Harry’s recollections since all his other recollections are likewise italicized passages. So, then, the symbol is not “something the writer has tacked on”; but rather it is an integral part of the story. “He uses the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro as the symbol of death, but the symbolism is not part of the action and therefore does not operate as a controlling image.” Gordon damns the story as a magnificent failure, whereas it as a magnificent success.
Caroling Gordon in the textbook anthology The House of Fiction (1950) opines that Hemingway “has made no provision for the climax of his symbolic action. Our attention is not called to the snow–covered peaks of Kilimanjaro until the end of the story; as a result we do not feel that sense of recognition and inevitability which help to make a kathasis.” []
4.4 The leopard
The leopard is not only a symbol of death, but also the symbol of Harry’s dream to seek “the House of God”.
“Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.”12[p.39]
Harry’s “vision” of Kilimanjaro in his death-dream returns us at the end to the opening passage and shapes the whole in circular form. Immediately following that italicized image of the Kilimanjaro summit, which in effect is a riddle to be unriddled, Harry says: “The marvelous thing is that it is painless.” But it wasn’t painless for that leopard to ascend the summit, an ascent which Harry never attempted, he was attainted an immortality which Harry never earned. The symbol is far more than simply a symbol of death. That leopard exceeded the nature and aspirations of his kind: “no one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.”
Well, the leopard wasn’t seeking immortality, being only a dumb beast; but he got just that in attaining the heights, admission to “the House of God”.
5. Conclusion
5.1 Main statement
In this paper, this dead image will be analyzed from Symbolism. Harry’s gangrenous leg is token symbol of his moral gangrene as creative writer, and his real life has over. Harry’s own death-wish, in contrast to Williamson, Harry does not die in agony. The snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro is the symbol of death. The leopard is not only a symbol of death, but also the symbol to seek “the House of God”. In contrast to the noble leopard, the hyena is the symbol of death which Harry imagines.
5.2 Significance
In theory, Symbol is a way of using something integral to the work to reach beyond the work and engage the world of value outside the work. The relationship between the symbol and its referent is not often one of simple equivalence. Symbolists tend to avoid any direct statement of meaning. Instead, they work through emotionally powerful symbols that suggest meaning and mood.
In practice, through the function of symbolism in Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro, we can see the author’s attitude and comprehension toward life. Trough it, we can also see the author’s concise and implicit characteristics which form the author’s style of “Iceberg”. Hemingway avoids any direct statement of meaning. Instead, he works through emotionally powerful symbols that suggest meaning and mood. So the short story has more significance.
5.3 Limitation
In the paper, many italicized passages are not analyzed from symbolism, for example, the plain. “The cot the man lay on was in the wide shade of a mimosa tree and as he looked out past the shade onto the glare of the plain there were three of the big birds squatted obscenely, while in the sky a dozen more sailed, making quick-moving shadows as they passed.” The plain, which is stifling land, is a symbol of degenerate life which is Harry’s life.
Bibliography:
[1]Edward Murray, “Ernest Hemingway—Cinematic Strcture in Fiction and Problems in Adaptation,” in his The Cinematic Imagination:Writers and the Motion Pictures, Ungar, 1972, pp218-43.
[2]Robert W.Stallman, “A New Reading of‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’” in his The House That JamesBuilt and Other Literary Studies,Ohio University Press,1961, pp 193-99.
[3]Malcolm Cowley,“Hemingway’s Novel Has the Rich Simplicity of a Classic”, in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, September 7, 1952. pp344-346.
[4]李忠华,浅谈《乞力马扎罗的雪》中的象征,解放军外国语学院学报,第23卷第3期,2000年5月,P78-81.
[5]龚从贵,漫淡《乞力马扎罗的雪》的隐喻性,安徽工业大学学报社会科学版,第20卷第5期2003年9月,p107-109.