In a 2-3 page essay, compare and contrast (F. Scott Fitzgerald.docx

****In a 2-3 page essay, compare and contrast (F. Scott
Fitzgerald, “Winter Dreams”) and (“Ernest Hemingway, "The
Snows of Kilimanjaro")
--As you write the essay, stay focused on your chosen topic. Do
not attempt to cover too much ground; do not re-hash the
obvious. Instead, zero in on a unique point of
comparison/contrast (characters, setting, theme, use of specific
details, symbols or images).
Draft a one-sentence thesis statement that argues your point.
Then develop that thesis through the paragraphs that follow.
The last paragraph should be a conclusion in which you tie
everything together.
Remember always to give focused, specific support as you
discuss similarities and differences in the stories’ treatment of
the issue you have chosen to write about.
**Both of the stories summaries are below.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Winter Dreams”
F. Scott Fitzgerald divides “Winter Dreams” into six episodes.
In the first, fourteen-year-old Dexter Green, whose father owns
the “second best” grocery store in Black Bear Lake, Minnesota,
has been earning thirty dollars a month pocket money caddying
at the Sherry Island Golf Club. He is responsible and honest,
touted by at least one wealthy patron as the “best caddy in the
club.” His decision to quit his job comes suddenly—proclaimed,
to incredulous protests, to be the result of his having got “too
old.” Such public excuse masks the real and private reason:
Dexter has just been smitten head-over-heels by the willful,
artificial, and radiant eleven-year-old Judy Jones, who, with her
nurse, shows up at the club carrying five new golf clubs in a
white canvas bag and demanding a caddy. Dexter watches her
engage in a sudden and passionate altercation with the nurse,
which piques his interest and works to align him with Judy. He
not only sympathizes with her but also senses that an equally

sudden and violent act on his part (his resignation) can be the
only possible response to the “strong emotional shock” of his
infatuation.
In the second episode, which takes place nine years later,
Dexter has become a successful entrepreneur in the business
world. His laundries cater to moneyed patrons by specializing in
fine woolen golf stockings and women’s lingerie. Playing golf
one afternoon with men for whom he once caddied, Dexter
contemplates his humble past by studying the caddies serving
his party, but the reverie is broken when a golf ball hits one of
the men in his party in the stomach. It was driven by Judy
Jones, now an “arrestingly beautiful” woman of twenty, who,
with her partner, nonchalantly plays through Dexter’s foursome.
After an early-evening swim, Dexter is resting on the raft
farthest from the club and enjoying strains of piano music from
across the lake. Judy approaches by motorboat, introducing
herself and requesting that Dexter drive the boat so that she can
ride behind on a surfboard, making clear that she is dallying to
delay returning home, where a young man is waiting for her.
The encounter ends with her offhand invitation to Dexter to join
her for dinner the following night.
In the third episode, visions of Judy’s past beaux flit through
Dexter’s mind as he waits downstairs for Judy, dressed in his
most elegant suit. When she does appear, though, Dexter is
disappointed that she is not dressed more elaborately. In
addition, her depression disturbs him, and when, after dinner,
she confides that the cause of it lies in her discovery that a man
she cared for had no money, Dexter is able to reveal matter-of-
factly that he is perhaps the richest man of his age in the
Northwest. Judy responds to this information with excited
kisses.
The fourth episode forms the culmination of Judy’s tantalizing
and irresistible charm. It shows a dozen men, Dexter among
them, circulating around her at any given moment, always
entranced, alternately in and out of her favor.
After experiencing three ecstatic days of heady mutual

attraction following their first dinner, Dexter is devastated to
realize that Judy’s attentions and affections are being turned
toward a man from New York, of whom she tires after a month.
Thereafter, she alternately encourages and discourages Dexter,
and when, eighteen months later, he realizes the futility of
thinking that he could ever completely possess Judy, he
becomes engaged to a girl named Irene Scheerer, who never
appears as an actual character in the story. In contrast to the
passion and brilliance that Judy inspires in him, Dexter feels
solid and content with the “sturdily popular” and “intensely
great” Irene.
One night when Irene has a headache, which precludes her
going out with him, Dexter passes the time by watching the
dancers at the University Club and is startled by the sound of
Judy’s voice behind him. Back from Florida, Hot Springs, and a
broken engagement, she seems eager to tantalize Dexter again
and asks if he has a car. As they drive around the city, Judy
teases him with “Oh, Dexter, have you forgotten last year?” and
“I wish you’d marry me.” Dexter is confused about whether the
remarks are sincere or artificial, but when, for the first time, she
begins to cry in his presence, lamenting that she is beautiful but
not happy, Dexter is passionately drawn to her once again,
despite his better judgment. When Judy invites him to come
inside her house, Dexter accepts.
The fifth episode takes place ten years later. Dexter reminisces
about how the passion rekindled from that one night lasted only
a month, yet he feels that the deep happiness was worth the
deep pain. He knows now that he will never really own Judy,
but that he will always love her. At the outbreak of the war,
having broken off his engagement with Irene and intending to
settle in New York, Dexter instead turns over the management
of his laundries to his partner and enlists in an officer’s training
program.
The final episode occurs seven years after the war. Dexter is
now a very successful businessperson in New York City.
Devlin, a business acquaintance from Detroit, makes small talk

by remarking that one of his best friends in Detroit, at whose
wedding Devlin ushered, was married to a woman from Dexter’s
hometown. At the mention of Judy’s name, Dexter pumps
Devlin for more information and learns that Judy’s life has
become an unfortunate one indeed—her husband drinks and runs
around with other women while she stays at home with the
children. Worst of all, though, is the fact that she has lost her
beauty. When Devlin leaves, Dexter weeps, not so much for the
fact that Judy’s physical beauty has faded, but that something
spiritual within him has been lost: his illusion, his youth, his
winter dream.
“Ernest Hemingway, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"
Hemingway is as an author who presents readers with an
“iceberg” scenario in which most of the substance lies far
beneath the surface and cannot be seen or known. As a result,
one is constantly forced to play detective and unravel (or
sometimes merely guess at) the brief glimpses of inside stories
presented. In addition to this, Hemingway also offers several
metaphors and figurative images and ideas that serve as guides
for the reader when attempting to dismember a story.
Throughout his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
metaphors play an important role, particularly as they relate to
the disintegration of Harry as an author and creative man.
Strangely, however, this process of decay, despite its parallels
to the gangrenous infection plaguing his right leg, did not begin
suddenly, but evolved over time.
Much of the short story by Hemingway, “The Snows of
Kilimanjaro” is thus given over to the idea of infection and its
causes—namely, in this case, becoming accustomed to a
domestic kind of luxury and relative ease and the reader is left
to extrapolate the far deeper ideas that wait under the surface.
In the process of deeply analyzing the metaphor of infection,
one finds related issues such as apathy, self-pity, and the
creation of scapegoats are not symptoms of weakness caused by
such a creative or even spiritual infection, but are actually the

cause. Through this examination of these more subtle meanings,
allusions, and symbolic functions of different aspects of “The
Snows of Kilimanjaro” one is able to see clearly many layers of
depth in a story that is about far more than a man with gangrene
who resents the fact that he is faced with unfulfilled ambitions
and is rather, in fact, a deep meditation on issues of true
creativity and more generally, the human impulse to grow
complacent in the presence of comfort. The story itself takes a
backseat to these more compelling philosophical questions and
by the conclusion, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” becomes more
allegory than straightforward tale.
There are extensive parallels between the infection in Harry’s
leg and the metaphorical “infection” of his writing talents. In
one of the first narrative breaks after the beginning of the story
where the couple is bickering, the narrator finally introduces the
reader to the inner world of Harry, stating, “Since the gangrene
started in his right leg he had no pain and with the pain the
horror had gone and all he felt now was a great tiredness and
anger that this was the end of it” (1849). Interestingly, this
infection in his leg that leads to an extreme feeling of numbness
and emptiness is echoed in the way Harry feels about the
stifling of his writing abilities and motivation by the
domesticating influence of Helen and perhaps more importantly,
the easy security and comfort afforded by wealth. In perfect
sync with this description of the numbness and tiredness caused
by the physical infection, Harry’s mental and creative infection,
which has been caused (at least in his mind) by the comfort of
Helen and her money is described with exactly the same sense
of gradual loss of feeling until only emptiness remains. The
narrator recounts Harry’s feelings, saying, “each day of not
writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his
ability and softened his will to work so that finally, he did no
work at all” (1853). In other words, the “gangrene” in this
metaphor is this crippling influence on his writing and
creativity as he has spent too long simply living rather than
pursuing his craft and instead of feeling constant pain over this

loss, he is empty and oscillates between apathy and sudden
moments of rage and sadness and is unable to sustain one
emotion for long. If one emotion or sense remains at the end of
the story, it is that same emptiness as the reader realizes that
only the emptiness of unused and unrealized vision remains
amid a brief but useless fantasy.
The narrator’s description of Harry’s process of infection,
despite its medical tone, actually masks an even deeper
metaphor about the nature of Harry’s demise as a writer and his
demise as a once whole and “uninfected” person. When Helen
asks how they ever managed to get to such a point, Harry
replies in what might seem to be a rather non-complex
statement, “I suppose what I did was to forget to put iodine on
it when I first scratched it. Then I didn’t pay attention to it
because I never infect. Then, later, when it got bad, it was
probably using that weak carbolic solution when the other
antiseptics ran out that paralyzed the minute blood vessels and
started the gangrene” (1850). The metaphorical significance of
this seemingly straightforward statement cannot be ignored as it
is central to one of the major themes of the story.
By allowing himself to sit too long in the lap of luxury without
devoting attention to his craft, Harry “scratched” himself and
instead of applying the metaphorical “iodine” of an escape from
this easy life and return to places of true inspiration (Paris,
Constantinople, Austria) he merely used a “weak carbolic
solution” whose metaphorical equivalent is a trip to Africa. This
trip to the mountain was supposed to help him “work the fat off
his soul” (1853) but he waited too long to apply the remedy
when the first signs of danger emerged. What is most interesting
about the parallels between the physical and the mental or
creative infections is that in order to try to find a way out of the
emptiness and numbness, he attacks Helen.
What is also striking about the medical-sounding but deeply
metaphorical description of what went wrong with his leg is that
it is immediately followed by a sudden nasty and vehement
attack on Helen’s old money and his jab about her leaving her

old money people to “take him on.” Not only is the idea of her
“taking him on” aggressive and offensive-sounding—as if it had
been Helen’s aim all along to destroy his essence as a write and
seduce him into a coma-inducing life of luxury—it completely
ignores his own part in succumbing to the easier life. At this
point it is clear that Harry does not take complete responsibility
for his creative gangrene and emptiness but instead prefers to
find other causes. In many cases throughout the story Harry
does not consider himself to be the sole cause of his affliction,
but is wont to blame his lack of inspiration and devotion to his
craft on others who seduce him, particularly the women like
Helen whom he makes “his bread and butter by” (1852).
However, almost as though the figurative fever dissipates for a
moment, relieving the paranoid vision of himself as a victim,
Harry occasionally realizes in striking moments that he has only
himself to blame.
At one point, he suddenly turns his cruel focus away from Helen
and gazes inward, saying, “He had destroyed his talent 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, by
laziness, by sloth, by snobbery, ,by pride and by prejudice, by
hook and by crook” (1853). Moments like this allow the reader
to see the conflicted nature of his soul and more importantly, to
view him as more complex since he clearly does not hate Helen
for causing his misfortunes and slack as a writer. This sense of
conflict about her role in his demise as a writer is most clearly
articulated when the narrator, who has intimate knowledge of
Harry’s inner being, refers to Helen as “this rich bitch, this
kindly caretaker and destroyer of his talent” (1853). Even from
the beginning of the story, “the professional impotence which
he has experienced for some time manifests itself, by the time
of the action of the story, in a barrage of self-pitying, cowardly,
and cruel observations. The bitterness of these perceptions is
compounded by the fact that he is now literally dying, whereas
before he was merely partly dead morally” (Whitlow 54). This
inner conflict is part of the venom—part of the main source of

the gangrene-like infection of his soul and creativity and is
present in his other dealings with women (especially rich ones)
whom he discusses briefly throughout his reminiscences.
There are a number of ways the infection metaphor persists
throughout “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and there are also
different ways of perceiving it. While it has been suggested here
that the life of comfort that he cannot refuse is the initial source
of infection along with being unable or unwilling to treat the
situation to discourage worsening, others have offered related
ideas about the meaning of the infection metaphor. For instance,
one scholar suggests that Harry’s “artistic conscience, although
feeble, is still alive, gnawing at his soul. His failure to care for
a thorn scratch on his knee a few weeks ago fits into the pattern
of his small neglects, over the years, of his artistic talent. In
both cases, the fault is clearly his” (Johnston 224). These little
acts of forgetting his purpose as a writer build gradually until
he cannot tell a story without resorting to doing so in a fit of
sorts. All of his stories are further frustrated by the fact that
they cannot be dictated—it is too late for him to express these
ideas and leave something meaningful behind. In exchange, they
come out without any sense of connectedness and almost like
dreams in terms of their lack of relation to one another and
constantly conflicted sets of emotions, themes, images and
ideas. In other words, this broken structure of his last and most
reserved tales is infected by this hurried desire to spew; to
release them from his soul or to sever them like a gangrenous
leg.
As “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” progresses and it becomes clear
that Harry is afflicted in every conceivable way aside from the
most obvious physical infection, the nuances of the structure of
the story begin to become clearer. The issue of the intense and
incredibly long-winded stories that Harry desperately tries to
write in his mind so that he can hold them one last time are full
of subtle meanings and icebergs that stand independent to the
point where each would require its own set of many pages.
Instead of delving into the meaning of them all individually,

however, it is important to note their feverish intensity which is
almost infallibly followed by a motherly request or statement
from his “kindly caretaker” that brings both Harry and the
reader out of the fantastic and engaging world of the storyteller.
This cut-off structure serves two purposes and the structure is
itself a metaphor for intense longing to do what can no longer
be done. On the one hand, the sudden release into the calm
civilized voice of Helen the reader experiences from these
fevered intense stories that are ripe with life and blunt
description make one feel the sudden cut-off from the creative,
vital and ideal world Harry wishes to live in versus the stark
and, by comparison, rather mundane world of his wife. While
this helps the reader understand Harry’s crisis more acutely,
this structural shift also brings home the sadness of his last
wishes to write something meaningful so desperately when he is
clearly so unable. The italicized text and long descriptive
sentences stand in sharp contrast to the droll and pedestrian
conversations he has with Helen immediately following; almost
as though both Harry and the reader have been suddenly and
without desiring to, snapped back into reality. At one point, in
one of his most lucid moments during his story the narrator says
of Harry, “He had never written any of that because, at first, he
never wanted to hurt anyone and then it seemed as though there
was enough to write without it. But he had always thought that
he would write it finally. There was so much to write…He had
been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of
it; but now he never would” (1857).
The idea of infection that runs throughout “The Snows of
Kilimanjaro” is further emphasized by the presence of carrion
feeder birds as well as the hyena, both of which are harbingers
of death, decay, and disease. These “dirty” animals are
contrasted with the more romantic images of a frozen leopard
atop a snow-covered mountain and while these two have nothing
in common, they are diametrically opposed while still retaining
symbolic and metaphorical importance to the reader’s
understanding of Harry. While the beginning of the story offers

readers the sadly heroic image of a leopard who climbed far too
high and perished, this is not, at least by the end of the story, a
symbol or metaphor for Harry as he existed. If anything, the
leopard symbolizes his dreams to break free of his creature
comforts and begin writing in earnest again. Like Harry, once
he climbed to a certain height he was able to go no further
andsimply froze. Instead of being most closely associated with
the leopard, the hyena, a symbol of death is far more
appropriate. He has lived on the existence of others and is given
to either mad maniacal howling fits or periods of a brooding
watchfulness. By placing these two symbolic animals across
from one another, Hemingway is almost forcing the reader to
choose a side to defend in an argument about the allegorical
nature of the story and what, if any, hero or heroic ideal exists.
By the end of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” these numerous
metaphors and allusions to frustrated desire, loss, and the death
of talent through a spiritual or creative infected are brought
together into a more meaningful allegory. The end reveals a
man of great talent who allowed himself to succumb to the
pleasures of the everyday man and the rich—pleasures which
are off-limits to a creative force who thrives off of being among
the poor and those who are full of life and interesting stories. In
effect, Harry has become what he what he most resented and
found unworthy of writing about and this, not necessarily his
inglorious death, is the real tragedy. While he blamed Helen
(who, it is clear, is merely an innocent bystander with the best
intentions, albeit a lack of understanding of her husband) and
drink and any number of things in his life, it was ultimately his
courage that was the metaphorical scrape on the knee. He was
never able to pluck himself out of a comfortable situation,
perhaps out of fear of ideas such he mentioned; hurting people,
being afraid to write about what truly mattered or letting
himself truly engage with life. Despite Harry’s vision, “In
reality, the rescue plane does not arrive on time and Harry’s
corpse is discovered by his wife in the tent. The rescue and
flight to Kilimanjaro are only what-might-have-been…The tent,

the abode of the transient, is fitting shelter for the artistic
failure” (Johnston 227).

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In a 2-3 page essay, compare and contrast (F. Scott Fitzgerald.docx