Comparison Between Pale Horse, Pale Rider By Katherine Ann Porter And The Snows of Kilimanjaro By Ernest Hemingway

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Comparison Between Pale Horse, Pale Rider By Katherine Ann Porter And The Snows of Kilimanjaro By Ernest Hemingway

This paper is going to discuss and analyze fully two short American

fiction stories which are 'Pale horse, Pale Rider' by Katherine Ann

Porter and ' The Snows of Kilimanjaro' by Ernest Hemingway. By reading

the bibliographies of both these authors, one finds that Porter and

Hemingway have met in a certain period of their life, where they could

have shared lots of ideas and agreed on lots of different issues.

By the end of reading both stories, one notices that there are lots of

similarities found in both stories. One of the obviously noticed

similarity is the autobiographical elements which has been enriched

and elaborated on by the author's imaginations which makes it have the

reality of actual experience lived. It adds to the feelings of the

authors and the people who lived at that period and faced these kinds

of crisis.

Another similarity is the technique of switching from reality to

delirious dreams/ fantasy/hallucinations and vice versa. For example

in ' Pale horse, pale rider' the reader first sees Miranda in a dream

where she was in her childhood home " How I have loved this house in

the morning before we all awake and tangled together like badly cast

fishing lines…Too many have died in this bed already, there are far

too many ancestral bones propped up on the mantelpieces,… what

accumulation of storied dust never allowed to settle in peace for one

moment." With this wealth of precise, vivid details, the author hints

at important ideas that will be developed more fully and richly later

in the story. In the...

... middle of paper ...

... he dies from the disease that he caught from

Miranda and not from the war. But Miranda however, survived from the

disease. The other character is Harry who is also physically and

mentally sick. The physical illness of Harry is the gangrene, which

spreads through all of his body, and starting from his legs. It

started in his legs, but Harry seemed to ignore it, which lead to his

death. Harry's mental illness is really obvious in the story. Harry, a

hopeful writer, came to realize in his last moments of life that he

had not accomplished anything in his life. He began to blame others

for the death that was awaiting him and for all the things he never

wrote. Harry shows disappointment of not being able to write by

saying, "he would never write the things that he had saved to write

until he knew enough to write them well."

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