If death is the sovereign remedy for the misfortunes of life and you are obsessed, as Hemingway was, with pride, honor, and dignity and, on top of that, if you are an artist who, like the bullfighter, can no longer perform, then killing, even if it is the self, must have singular appeal. To lose your memory, one of the most important elements in writing, would be unbearable. It is not difficult to imagine Hemingway, the artist, administering death in the arena of life, in order to dramatize his life and his death. Using the corrida as metaphor it is possible to envisage Hemingway playing the dual role of matador and bull simultaneously, a consummate artist and sacrificial animal.
In his art, Hemingway achieved the fourth and fifth dimensions to which he aspired. However, the debility of old age and his inability to continue writing (he had undergone shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic) had curtailed his freedom and virtually eliminated his passion. All he had left was rebellion, the third element in Camus’s triad. Hemingway had constructed his life vigorously, but at the end, his body and his mind were spent. No further achievement seemed possible and there were no summits on the horizon, except perhaps the “House of God” toward which, like the dying protagonist in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, he could aspire. This melding of art and life, of triumph and defeat, of a winner at the end of the line, is the sublime, although tragic, image of Hemingway in his final hour.
His famous Gulf Stream passage in Green Hills of Africa, whatever else it is, can be read as a paradigm of the absurd and of Sisyphus’s eternal and renewable defeat: “and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing–the stream”. Despite the absurd, Hemingway’s achievement proves that there is a difference between dying at the age of twenty and dying at the age of fifty. Both his life and Camus’s demonstrate that Sisyphus’s endeavors can fill the void with meaning and purpose.