earticle

영어

This study aims to re-read Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in the light of Mikhail Baktin’s dialogical concepts such as “unfinalizability”, “polyphony”, and “heteroglossia,” and see how they operate in the story. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” describes the process in which Harry, the hero fails to take care of a small injury that he gets while hunting on the plains of Africa and therefore eventually dies from gangrene, during which he also reflects on his spiritual failure and recognizes his true vision as a writer. The story consists of six main sections composed of the dialogues of Harry and his wife and the narration describing the cause and effect of the main hero’s fall, with five flashbacks recording Harry’s past memories. The ‘unfinalizability’ is embodied in the main character’s ceaseless will to writing, while the diverse forms of voices, including narrations, dialogues, and flashbacks, driving the story’s development, manifest the ‘sense of polyphony.’ Finally, the organization of flashbacks, which imply the author’s aspiration for or discontent against the contemporary society, functions as Bakhtin’s ‘heteroglossia.’ The three Bakhtinian concepts immersed in this story are providing a reader with another chance to expand the diversity of its interpretation.