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 second part of the same dream, there is suspicion or foreshadowing of death, when pale, evil, and greenish stranger calls Miranda on a journey, but Miranda says that she is not ready this time, " I'm not going with you this time, ride on", this was a big sign of death which came to Miranda and nearly got her but fortunately she defeated somehow the disease. The author effectively uses the dream to foreshadow the evil and tragedy that will affect Miranda from the world she lives in. after the dream the author moves the reader from the world of Miranda's imagination to the real world by stating an indirect everyday thought " But let me get a fine yawn first". The dream world represents the real world.
On the other hand, in " The Snows of Kilimanjaro" the fantasy world and memories of Harry's past are shown by an italic style of typed text, which can be easily determined.
Most of Harry's (the protagonist) memories are of his past as a writer and his love affairs. Harry lives his life through his past, he regrets everything he done, he's mentally and physically ill. Harry is very bitter towards the woman, his companion on the wild African safari, his remarks were very cruel and harsh, for example "you bitch, you rich bitch". Perhaps the inspiration of Harry's character came from Hemingway who was misogynist himself. Harry blames his failure on everyone but he haven't got the cpurage to face reality and blame himself, "she shot very well this good, this rich bitch, this kindly caretaker and destroyer of my talent".
Both stories are nonchronological, filled with flashbacks, memories, fantasies etc. In "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" the author uses a modified form of the stream of consciousness techniques within Miranda's character, which presents the flow of thoughts, sensations, fears, reflections and memories of Miranda from full consciousness to unconscious deliriums, the author may have been adopting some of Sigmund Freud's approaches (psychoanalytic). In both these stories, the authors keep on shifting from the reality world to the memories or the dream world. The importance of these techniques, that they give the text a sense of enrichment and complexity, where most of these flashbacks/dreams/memories helps the reader to understand the kind of thoughts and feelings that these people have been through.
Both the characters in the 2 stories are physically and mentally ill. The character of Miranda is suffering from an influenza that have killed nearly 20-40 million people at world war one and she was also suffering from her loneliness and isolation. She later meets a soldier at the army (Adam) and falls in love with him. Adam is sent over to the war, but ironically 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."