I. Introduction
1.1 About the author
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, as well as the veterans of World War One later known as “the Lost Generation”, as described in his posthumous memoir A Moveable Feast. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Hemingway’s distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement. It had a significant influence on the development of twentieth-century fiction writing. His protagonists are typically stoic men who exhibit an ideal described as “grace under pressure.” Many of his works are now considered canonical in American literature.
Hemingway incorporated the deep understanding of death into his own life consciousness with unique, grave and stern sight. First published in the August, 1936, issue of Esquire, The Snows of Kilimanjaro has been called Hemingway’s short story masterpiece. He wrote the story after his first safari to Africa and was so fascinated by the place that he told reporters he wanted to go back as soon as he had enough money. A wealthy woman read his remarks and offered to finance the trip for Hemingway, his wife Pauline, and herself. Hemingway turned her down, but he wondered what the trip would have been like if he had gone, and the story was born from that notion.
1.2 About the fiction
The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a combination of fact and fiction. In the story, while facing his imminent death on an African safari, a writer goes in and out of consciousness. During his conscious moments, he argues with his wife and seems intent on destroying her. During unconscious or dream-like states, he remembers his life and has insights into why he made some of the choices he made. He has regrets, fears, and some wonderful memories of good times, as well. These memories are based on Hemingway’s own experiences and professional career.
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. 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.
Ⅱ. An analysis on stream of consciousness in the fiction
2.1 About the stream of consciousness
2.1.1 Presentation of stream of consciousness
Stream of consciousness is the continuous flow of sense-perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human mind or a literary method of representing such a blending of mental processes in fictional characters, usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed form of interior monologue. An important device of modernist fiction and its later imitators, the techniques was pioneered by Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage (1915-35) and by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922), and further developed by Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and William Faulkner in The sound and the Fury (1928). In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode that seeks to portray an individual’s point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character’s thought p
