Ernest Hemingway
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indulge. The one thing that saves the story is the vision at the end, as the dying man hallucinates an escape from his confinement and a plane journey over the brilliant snows of the mountain. Criticisms of the plausibility of this rather miss the point. It is both a breathtaking narrative device, reminiscent of the coup de the´aˆtre of Bierce’s ‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, and a poetic symbol of the triumph of writing, the beautiful vision rising above and lasting beyond ‘the fury and the mire of human veins’. As such it combines two strands of the American short story: narrative artifice (in Hawthorne, in Twain, in Bierce, in O. Henry) and the modernist tradition of poetic symbolism (in Joyce, in Hemingway, in Flannery O’Connor). But the brilliant symbol of the snows of Kilimanjaro may be too flamboyant a note on which to close this account of Hemingway’s short stories. Nor are his greatest strengths shown by the later long story The Old Man and the Sea of 1954 (for all that it was probably decisive in his winning the Nobel prize). Depite passages of epic simplicity and power, it becomes somewhat ponderous in the execution of its humanistic and tragic intent. In particular, the old man’s running monologue (silent and voiced) does not always ring true: too much of Hemingway himself creeps in. A better place to end would be back with the altogether admirable and representative short story of 1933, ‘A Clean Well-Lighted Place’. This story about an old man and two waiters in a cafe´ is a kind of emblem of the human need for order and community at its most basic level. In its precise observation and delicate physical awareness, its unpretentious humanity and its unsentimental sense of human vulnerability it stands for a sense of life which lies deeper than the flourishes of the Hemingway masculinist ‘code’. It was late and everyone had left the cafe´ except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the diVerence.