Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

“The Road Not Taken” in Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
129
“There wasn’t time, of course, although it seemed as though it telescoped so
that you might put it all into one paragraph if you could get it right.”(50)
“No, he had never written about Paris. Not the Paris that he cared about. But
what about the rest that he had never written?” (52)
“He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never
written one. Why?” (53)
“But if he lived he would never write about her, he knew that now. Nor about
any of them.” (53)
The above quoted sentences have a clear meaning: Harry has not
taken that path and has never done the things that he wished for.
Thus, his accomplishments remain in the realm of missed opportunities.
The perfection he wanted to achieve through writing remains an
ideal that will never be realized, even if the ideal continually bombards
Harry’s mind. He never attempted to write the many stories
that he intended to write, which might have gained a permanent place
in literature for him; they remain locked in his memory. Therefore, all
his bitter regrets and remarks in his dying moments concerning his
betrayal of craft and self do not atone for a wasted artistic life. The
scenes of reminiscences remain in his imagination, unfulfilled. “They
remain in the limbo of his delirium” (Bluefarb 6). Harry regretfully
tells himself that he “could or should have written” about them, but
he deserted his talent for the corrupting appeal of becoming a rich
woman’s kept man. As Marion Montgomery puts it “throughout the
story the emphasis has been on the ideal of attempt, not on accomplishment”
(282). Those scenes remain outside Harry’s work, within
the limits of illusory possibility, never to be fulfilled or consumed.
Harry can only think back on these moments without any
compensation in the present. Repetition, which is an important stylistic
device in the modernist aesthetic that Hemingway uses in his
fiction extensively, is particularly suitable here as it shows the sense of
unfulfilled desires that keep bombarding the protagonist throughout
the story (Lodge 157).
Four elements in the story are worth analyzing in order to support
such an interpretation of the other road as an illusion: Hemingway’s
innovative and unusual narrative style, typography, the symbols