The Snows of Kilimanjaro quiz

Questions and answers

1. 1

   Question 1. Which literary movement best describes "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"?

   • Naturalism
   • Romanticism
   • Realism
   • Gothic
   • Correct answer: Modernism

   Modernism is correct. Hemingway uses fragmented narrative — cutting between a dying man's dialogue and his italicized stream-of-consciousness memories — to represent a mind dissolving under the pressure of death. The story refuses linear plot, privileges subjective experience over action, and questions whether art and authentic living can coexist with wealth. These are distinctly Modernist concerns.

   Read the passage
2. 2

   Question 2. How did Harry injure the leg that is now killing him?

   • He was injured when the truck broke down; the broken bone was never set
   • He was accidentally shot while Helen was hunting; the bullet stayed inside
   • He was gored by a waterbuck he tried to photograph; the wound never healed
   • Correct answer: He scratched it on a thorn and neglected to treat the wound; gangrene set in

   Harry's fatal wound is devastatingly mundane: he scratched his knee on a thorn and failed to apply antiseptic. Gangrene set in. He is dying not from a heroic wound but from negligence — a small carelessness turned lethal. This is deliberate on Hemingway's part: Harry's physical death mirrors his moral failure, both the result of inattention and self-neglect.

   Read the passage
3. 3

   Question 3. Where was "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" first published?

   • The New Yorker
   • Scribner's Magazine
   • Correct answer: Esquire magazine
   • The Atlantic Monthly

   The story was first published in Esquire magazine in August 1936. Hemingway was a frequent contributor to Esquire in the 1930s.

   Read the passage
4. 4

   Question 4. What is Helen's role in Harry's life, and what does Harry resent about her?

   • She is a society writer for Town & Country, and he resents her popularity with his own readers
   • Correct answer: She is his wealthy wife whose money funded the comfortable life that he blames for ruining his writing
   • She is the safari's hired hunter, and he blames her careless shooting for the infection in his leg
   • She is the first woman he ever loved, the one who left him, and he resents the loneliness her leaving caused him

   Helen is Harry's wealthy wife whose money made possible the comfortable, luxurious life Harry believes destroyed his talent. He resents her not because she did anything wrong, but because he chose her wealth over his art — and now, dying, he cannot forgive himself for that choice. He transfers his self-blame onto her, making her the convenient target of his bitterness.

   Read the passage
5. 5

   Question 5. What is the name of Harry's wife in the story?

   • Correct answer: Helen
   • Frances
   • Catherine
   • Dorothy

   His wife's name is Helen. She tends to Harry throughout the story with genuine affection, though Harry treats her cruelly in his dying bitterness.

   Read the passage
6. 6

   Question 6. What does Mount Kilimanjaro symbolize in the story?

   • Suffering, guilt, and the deadly snow Harry remembers from the retreat through Thrace
   • Rescue, recovery, and the medical treatment Harry expects once the plane arrives
   • Happiness, adventure, and the earlier African safaris Harry enjoyed in his youth
   • Correct answer: Purity, artistic achievement, and the ideal Harry never reached during his lifetime

   Kilimanjaro's snow-covered summit symbolizes purity, artistic integrity, and the height of achievement Harry never reached. It stands permanently in the background — cold, perfect, and unreachable — as the embodiment of the great writer Harry could have been. The title itself is ironic: the snows belong to a peak Harry is dying beneath, not ascending. His final vision of flying toward the summit is his only moment of approach.

   Read the passage
7. 7

   Question 7. What is the significance of the frozen leopard mentioned in the story's epigraph?

   • It represents the trophies Harry and Helen traveled to Africa to collect, now abandoned because of his illness
   • It shows that Africa is a harsh environment where even powerful animals, like powerful men, die without warning
   • Correct answer: It represents a creature that died reaching for something beyond its nature, unlike Harry who never tried
   • It represents Helen, a skilled hunter who followed Harry far from her own people into an unfamiliar country

   The epigraph describes a leopard carcass found frozen near Kilimanjaro's summit — 'no one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.' The leopard represents striving toward an unreachable ideal, dying in the attempt. Harry is the anti-leopard: he had the capacity for greatness but chose comfort over the climb. The leopard's frozen corpse stands as an implicit judgment on the writer who never even tried to reach the summit.

   Read the passage
8. 8

   Question 8. Why does Hemingway print Harry's memory passages in italics?

   • Correct answer: To signal a shift into Harry's interior consciousness — his memories, regrets, and the unwritten stories flooding his mind
   • To show that Harry is hallucinating from fever, and these memories may not be real or accurate
   • To emphasize the foreign languages and place names that appear throughout Harry's European memories
   • To identify the passages Harry dictates to Helen, since he expects her to record his memories before he dies

   The italic passages are Hemingway's formal device for representing Harry's interior consciousness: the memories, regrets, and unwritten stories flooding his mind as he dies. They exist on a different narrative plane than the dialogue-driven present action. This is classic Modernist technique — the story moves between external reality (the camp, Helen, the hyena) and Harry's internal stream of consciousness, with typography marking the boundary.

   Read the passage
9. 9

   Question 9. What animal hovers around the camp as Harry is dying?

   • A jackal
   • Correct answer: A hyena
   • A zebra
   • A leopard

   A hyena circles the camp throughout the story and is heard crying in the night after Harry dies. In the moment Harry senses death arriving, the hyena 'slipped lightly along the edge of it' — and later he says death can have 'a wide snout like a hyena.'

   Read the passage
10. 10

    Question 10. What does the hyena circling the camp represent?

    • Correct answer: Death itself — a scavenger waiting patiently at the edges of Harry's failing life
    • Harry's publisher, who profits from his work without caring about its artistic merit
    • The African wildlife that Harry had hunted and destroyed without purpose during his safaris
    • Helen's friends and social circle, who consume Harry's talent without understanding its worth

    The hyena is one of the story's most direct symbols of death. It circles the camp, drawn by the smell of Harry's gangrene — it is already treating him as carrion. Harry hears it making an uncharacteristic whimpering sound at the precise moment he senses death arriving. The hyena's presence throughout the story creates an atmosphere of patient, inevitable ending, and its cry after Harry dies confirms what it has been waiting for all along.

    Read the passage
11. 11

    Question 11. What does Harry believe wealth did to his writing talent?

    • It had no effect on his talent, which declined simply due to aging and loss of inspiration
    • Correct answer: It corrupted and destroyed his talent by removing the necessity and hunger that drove authentic work
    • It gave him the security to write, but Helen's jealousy of his reputation prevented him from finishing anything
    • It gave him leisure time and financial freedom that he used productively to develop his craft

    Harry believes that wealth and comfort destroyed his talent by eliminating the necessity, struggle, and genuine experience that authentic writing requires. He traded poverty and creative hunger for security and luxury. The comfortable life numbed him; he stopped living at the edge where real stories come from. This is the story's central theme: that artistic integrity cannot survive the corruption of comfortable living. Harry chose the wrong thing and he knows it.

    Read the passage
12. 12

    Question 12. What does "Gangrene" mean in this story?

    • A recurring fever with chills and sweating, usually transmitted by the bite of a mosquito
    • A spreading infection of the bloodstream, usually caused by bacteria entering an open wound
    • Correct answer: Death and decay of body tissue, usually caused by loss of blood supply or infection
    • Damage to skin and tissue caused by freezing, most often affecting the fingers and toes

    Gangrene is the death and decay of body tissue, typically caused by infection or loss of blood supply. Harry's neglected thorn scratch became infected, and the infection has progressed to gangrene. He can literally smell his own rotting flesh — a visceral, grotesque detail Hemingway does not spare the reader. The rotting leg is also symbolic: the decay of Harry's artistic life made physical.

    Read the passage
13. 13

    Question 13. What is the relationship between Harry's unwritten stories and his approaching death?

    • The unwritten stories represent the ambitions Helen deliberately prevented him from pursuing — her constant travel left him no time to work
    • The unwritten stories represent projects he intends to complete once the plane arrives and the doctors in town repair his injured leg
    • The unwritten stories torment Harry because he fears another writer, like poor Julian, will publish them carelessly after his death
    • Correct answer: The unwritten stories represent everything authentic Harry experienced but traded away for comfort — they are his true legacy, now permanently lost

    The unwritten stories are the story's most painful element: Harry had lived the experiences that would have made great literature, but chose luxury over the discipline required to write them. As he dies, these stories flood his consciousness in the italicized passages — fragments of what his writing could have been. They are his real legacy, now permanently lost. The tragedy is not that he lacked material; it is that he had extraordinary material and squandered it.

    Read the passage
14. 14

    Question 14. How does Harry treat Helen as he is dying, and what does his behavior reveal about his character?

    • He is honest and measured, explaining calmly that their marriage was a mistake and asking her forgiveness
    • He is tender and grateful toward her, using his final hours to express the love he withheld during their marriage
    • Correct answer: He is cruel and contemptuous toward her, blaming her for his failures while knowing he is really blaming himself
    • He is emotionally distant but polite, treating her as a caretaker rather than as someone he has feelings for

    Harry is caustic, contemptuous, and deliberately hurtful to Helen. He mocks her, dismisses her affection, and says wounding things. But the story makes clear this cruelty is self-directed: Harry knows he chose his own comfortable decline, and Helen is the most convenient target for his self-contempt. He tells her at one point that he is being cruel intentionally — a rare moment of self-awareness that doesn't stop him from continuing. This makes him a deeply flawed but recognizably human character.

    Read the passage
15. 15

    Question 15. What does "Acquiescence" mean in this story?

    • Correct answer: Quiet acceptance of something without protest, even without really agreeing
    • A formal agreement signed by two sides after a long dispute between them
    • Knowledge of a person or a subject gained through experience rather than study
    • A sudden, sharp refusal to go on with an arrangement that has become unbearable

    Acquiescence is passive acceptance: going along without protest. As the boys light the fire and the camp settles for the night, Harry 'could feel the return of acquiescence in this life of pleasant surrender.' The word names exactly what he blames himself for: he did not fight for his talent, he let comfort have it. A reader may confuse it with acquaintance (knowing someone) or with an agreement actively made.

    Read the passage
16. 16

    Question 16. What kinds of experiences does Harry remember in the italicized passages, and what do they have in common?

    • They are all memories of combat from his years as a soldier, and he has since written about every one of them in detail
    • They are all affectionate memories of his first months with Helen, before the injury and the quarrelling began
    • They are all episodes from novels he has already published, which he now remembers with quiet satisfaction
    • Correct answer: They are all raw, intense, authentic experiences from his life before wealth that he never transformed into stories

    Harry's italicized memories span a wide range of intense, authentic experiences: World War I, poverty in Paris, a winter in the Austrian mountains, the retreat from Thrace, a hotel proprietor's suicide, hauling a shot man's frozen body sixty miles to town. These are the raw materials of great literature. What they share is that Harry lived all of them and wrote none of them. As he dies, these experiences play through his mind as the stories they should have become — a final, agonizing accounting of what was possible and never done.

    Read the passage
17. 17

    Question 17. What does "Obscenely" mean in this story?

    • In a way that is excessively loud and showy, demanding attention
    • Correct answer: In a way that is offensive and disgusting to look at, indecent
    • In a way that cannot be seen clearly, hidden by distance or glare
    • In a way that is dull and unremarkable, hardly worth noticing at all

    Obscenely means in an offensive, indecent, disgusting way. Out past the shade 'there were three of the big birds squatted obscenely, while in the sky a dozen more sailed.' The word carries Harry's revulsion at the vultures waiting for his death, and at himself. A reader may confuse it with obscurely, which means dimly or unclearly.

    Read the passage
18. 18

    Question 18. What does Harry experience as he is dying, and what is the significance of his final vision?

    • He reconciles with Helen, asks her forgiveness, and dies peacefully knowing she loved him truly
    • Correct answer: He sees a rescue plane arrive and imagines himself flying toward the snow-covered summit of Kilimanjaro
    • He imagines Compton flying him safely to Arusha, where doctors in town manage to save his infected leg
    • He hallucinates the Africa of his youth, sees himself young and healthy again, and dies in peace

    Harry experiences a vision of a rescue plane arriving, piloted by Compton. As the plane flies, Harry sees it heading not toward Arusha, where Compton said he would stop to refuel, but toward the immense, snow-covered summit of Kilimanjaro — 'as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white.' This final vision is the story's most debated moment: is it a dying hallucination, a symbolic transcendence, or an ironic mirage? In death, Harry 'arrives' at the summit he never reached in life. Whether this represents redemption or self-delusion is left for the reader to decide.

    Read the passage
19. 19

    Question 19. What does the story suggest about the relationship between artistic integrity and comfortable living?

    • Correct answer: Artistic integrity requires struggle and authentic experience; comfort corrupts the drive that produces great work
    • The relationship is neutral — artists succeed or fail based on talent alone, regardless of their financial circumstances
    • Poverty destroys creativity just as surely as wealth does; only middle-class stability produces lasting art
    • Wealth and comfort enhance creativity by freeing the artist from financial anxiety and survival pressures

    The story argues that artistic integrity and comfortable living are fundamentally incompatible. Harry's talent required necessity, struggle, and authentic experience at the edges of life. When wealth removed those conditions, it removed the hunger that drove him. He stopped living dangerously and started living comfortably — and the writing stopped too. This is one of Hemingway's most personal themes: the fear that success and security are the artist's worst enemies.

    Read the passage
20. 20

    Question 20. How does Hemingway structure the story's narrative, and what effect does this structure create?

    • He uses a linear chronological structure, following Harry continuously from the initial thorn scratch to the arrival of the rescue plane
    • He uses first-person narration from Harry's perspective to create intimate access to his regret and self-criticism
    • Correct answer: He uses alternating third-person past-tense camp scenes and italicized stream-of-consciousness memory passages to collapse Harry's past and present
    • He uses an unreliable third-person narrator who may be fabricating Harry's memories to make him seem more sympathetic

    Hemingway structures the story as an alternation between two narrative planes: the third-person past-tense scenes in the camp (the dialogue, the hyena, the approaching death) and the italicized interior passages (Harry's memories, regrets, and unwritten stories). This structure collapses time, making Harry's past and present simultaneous — a formal representation of a dying mind in which all of life surfaces at once. The structure is the meaning: Harry's whole life crowds into his final hours.

    Read the passage
21. 21

    Question 21. What do Harry's memories of Paris represent in the story's larger context?

    • They represent the poverty and discomfort he is relieved to have escaped, a neighborhood he has no desire to remember
    • They represent the European influences on his writing style that he later rejected in favor of American themes
    • They represent the reckless, irresponsible years of his youth — drinking, fighting, and quarrelling — that he outgrew after settling down with Helen
    • Correct answer: They represent the authentic creative period of his life — poverty, struggle, and the artistic community before wealth changed him

    Harry's Paris memories — cafes, cold rooms, poverty, other writers, authentic struggle — represent the creative period before comfort corrupted him. Paris in the 1920s was where young expatriate writers like Hemingway lived cheaply and wrote seriously, before any of them were successful or comfortable. For Harry (and for Hemingway himself), Paris represents the state of creative necessity and authentic experience that wealth eventually destroyed. The memories are not nostalgia for youth but grief for the conditions that made real writing possible.

    Read the passage
22. 22

    Question 22. Which of these events actually happened in the story?

    • Harry's leg wound was caused by a leopard attack.

      Didn't happen

      Harry's fatal wound came from a thorn scratch that he neglected to treat with antiseptic. The wound is embarrassingly small — the tragedy is that something so trivial was allowed to develop into fatal gangrene through carelessness.

    • A rescue plane appears, either in reality or in Harry's dying vision.

      Happened

      A rescue plane does appear — Compton arrives to fly Harry to Nairobi. Whether the plane's flight toward Kilimanjaro's summit is real or a dying hallucination is one of the story's central ambiguities.

    • Harry reconciles with Helen and asks her forgiveness before he dies.

      Didn't happen

      Harry does not reconcile with Helen. He is cruel and contemptuous toward her throughout, even as she tends to him. He dies without making peace with her or with himself.

    • The story opens with an epigraph about a leopard found frozen near Kilimanjaro's summit.

      Happened

      Hemingway opens the story with a brief epigraph about a leopard carcass found at a high altitude near Kilimanjaro's summit, with the note that no one has explained what it was seeking there. This epigraph establishes the story's central symbolic contrast between striving and surrender.

    • Harry's italicized memory passages are printed in italics to show they are hallucinations caused by fever.

      Didn't happen

      The italicized passages represent Harry's stream-of-consciousness memories, not fever hallucinations. They are the memories and unwritten stories flooding his mind as he dies — a Modernist technique for representing interior consciousness, not a suggestion that they are unreal.

    • A hyena is heard crying outside the tent after Harry's death.

      Happened

      Helen wakes to find Harry dead and hears the hyena's cry outside the tent. The hyena — which has circled the camp throughout the story — is the story's closing image of death waiting and now arriving.

    • Harry completes at least one of his long-planned stories before he dies.

      Didn't happen

      Harry writes nothing before he dies. The unwritten stories exist only as fragments in his memory-stream — they remain permanently unwritten. This is the story's central tragedy: the stories were possible, the material was there, and none of it was ever put on paper.

    • Helen genuinely loves Harry and tries to care for him.

      Happened

      Despite Harry's cruelty toward her, Helen's concern for him is portrayed as genuine. She gets him a drink, sits with him, deflects his insults, and weeps after his death. Hemingway does not make her a villain — she is simply the vehicle through which Harry chose comfort over art.

    • Harry's final vision takes the plane toward Arusha to refuel and on to a hospital.

      Didn't happen

      Compton says he will have to stop at Arusha to refuel, but in Harry's vision the plane turns instead toward the square top of Kilimanjaro, 'as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun,' and he knows that is where he is going.

    • The story was published during Hemingway's lifetime.

      Happened

      The story was published in Esquire magazine in August 1936, during Hemingway's lifetime. It is one of his most celebrated short stories and was later collected in 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories' (1961).

    Read the passage
23. 23

    Question 23. What does the epigraph's observation that "no one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude" suggest about the story's themes?

    • It suggests that the leopard was simply pursuing prey up the mountain, the way Helen hunts game to provide meat for the camp
    • Correct answer: It suggests that striving beyond one's natural limits is as instinctive as it is inexplicable — and that Harry failed to strive at all
    • It suggests that death at high altitude is inevitable for any creature, regardless of why it went there
    • It suggests that Harry, like the leopard, climbed too high by marrying into wealth and is now being punished for that ambition by dying far from home

    The epigraph's mystery — what drove the leopard to an altitude where it could not survive? — frames everything that follows as a question about motivation and striving. The leopard had no rational reason to climb that high, yet it did, and it died there. Harry had every rational reason to write — he had talent, experience, and material — and he did not. The leopard's inexplicable drive for the summit throws Harry's inexplicable surrender into relief. The contrast is Hemingway's indictment of his protagonist before the story even begins.

    Read the passage
24. 24

    Question 24. How does "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" demonstrate Hemingway's 'Iceberg Theory' of writing?

    • Harry explicitly tells Helen everything he regrets, and Helen explicitly tells Harry why she loves him despite his faults
    • The story omits the surface details of the African landscape, trusting readers to imagine the setting for themselves
    • Correct answer: The story shows Harry's corruption through action and bitter dialogue rather than authorial explanation — one bare admission, never argued out
    • Hemingway uses only short sentences and simple vocabulary, keeping his prose so minimal that readers must supply all the meaning

    The Iceberg Theory holds that the deeper meaning of a story should be implied through the visible surface of action and dialogue, not argued directly. Harry is allowed one bare admission, 'He had destroyed his talent himself,' and the list 'by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions.' Everything else, his cruelty to Helen, his resentment, the unwritten stories, is shown and left for the reader to weigh.

    Read the passage