Hemingway's protagonist in the story is Harry, a writer
facing his death from gangrene, the result of failing to put antiseptic on a scratch on
his knee before it became infected. The majority of the story recounts Harry's final
hours as he dies on the African plain where he has been on safari with the current rich
woman in his life. Harry's conversation with the woman, who is not named, and his life
as he remembers and evaluates it reveal his
character.
Harry is a sophisticated man, one who has
traveled and experienced much of the world. He is cynical, but not insensitive to
life--he remembers clearly moments of beauty as well as moments of savage human
behavior. His conversations with the woman show that he has the capacity to be cruel.
The bitterness with which he approaches his own death spills out in deliberately
hurtful, cutting comments to her. Her fear and pain do not move
him.
Finally, Harry is brutally honest in assessing how he
has compromised his own life, betraying his talent by selling himself to a series of
rich women:
He had destroyed his talent himself. Why should
he blame this woman because she kept him well? 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, and by snobbery . . . What was his
talent anyway? It was a talent all right but instead of using it, he had traded on it.
It was never what he had done, but always what he could do. And he had chosen to make
his living with something else instead of a pen or a
pencil.
As Hemingway depicts
him, Harry is perceptive but weak; he dies filled with regret for the choices he has
made.
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