“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” as an Allegory of the Anthropocene

This essay reads Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” as an allegory of the Anthropocene. The story presents an effort to rethink how to live, a concern that animated much of Hemingway’s writing and thinking. This rethinking involves dramatically exposing the faults of the narrator, who, read allegorically—in a general, not strict, way—evokes many of the values and systems of production that led to the Anthropocene. Thus, the narrator’s self-critique can also be read as a cultural critique, one sharpened and fitted to Anthropocene temporalities by the story’s “telescoping” technique.