"The Snows of Kilimanjaro"

Characters:
Harry - Man dying from gangrene infection
Helen - His rich wife

Plot:
Harry is a writer on a trip to Africa with his wife, Helen. He scraped his leg on a thorn and, not bothering to treat it right away, is deeply infected with advance stages of gangrene when we meet him in the story. For the most part he remains physically static, but engages in eating, drinking alcohol, speaking with his wife, and reflecting. He feels Death in a physical sense, and in fact his wife finds him dead in the night at the end of the story.

Dialogue exists in two forms throughout. Explicitly there is communication with his wife, a woman in love with him, but towards whom he has feelings of indifference. One particular sentence gives a good impression of the affair: "...it was strange that when he did not love her at all and was lying, that he should be able to give her more for her money than when he had really loved." He treats her poorly in many of their exchanges, being very candid about everything as he prepares to die. The second dialogue is an internal discourse reflecting on experiences and ideas which he had always meant to write, but never did because he did not feel that these impressions had been perfected. "Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well."

This is said to be one of Hemingway's best stories, and there is also speculation that it is one of his most autobiographical. It is undoubtedly good, but the interpersonal complexities and identity struggles in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" are better ingredients to a story than the internal struggles of Harry in the face of incompletion and death.

Best line in the story:

"So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear."