He Had Never Written a Word of That : Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Examines the use of embedded “counterfactuals” within the short story, arguing that these might-have-been scenarios provide coherence to a seemingly fragmented narrative. The counterfactuals convey Helen’s situational regret and Harry’s squandered writing potential. Harding reads the false ending as a counterfactual meant to elicit a similar sense of disappointment in the reader. Points out that Hemingway’s excess of counterfactual material smugly celebrates his own quite fulfilled writing potential. Slightly revised version published as “Complex Regrets: Counterfactuals in Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’” in Similes, Puns, and Counterfactuals in Literary Narrative (Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Stylistics Series), 128-39. New York: Routledge, 2017