American Literature the Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway This

American Literature The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

This summer you will be reading The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway. It is a deceptively simple novel that eloquently expresses Ernest Hemingway’s most fundamental beliefs about what it means to be a person. From its publication in 1952, The Old Man and the Sea has played an important role in defining and confirming Hemingway’s position as a major voice in twentieth­century fiction. Long famous for his short stories and early novels, The Sun Also Rises(1926) and A Farewell to Arms(1929), Hemingway built his public image upon that of his wounded, isolated heroes. His passion for bullfighting, fishing, and big game hunting inevitably led him to dangerous places and activities. He covered the Spanish Civil War as a reporter and later served as a war correspondent during World War II. By the 1950’s, he was at the height of his fame, living on a small estate or “finca” in Cuba and playing out his role as “Papa” Hemingway, the white­haired, white­bearded symbol of virility and intellectual heroism. With the publication of The Old Man and the Sea, a taut, technically brilliant short novel, his reputation as a master craftsman of prose narrative was reaffirmed. More importantly, however, the story of Santiago, the isolated old man who fights a great fish for three days, seemed to bring together all the major elements of Hemingway’s life and work. Indeed, it remains a concise expression of what it means for Hemingway to live and act as an individual in the modern world.

On first glance, the most striking aspect of The Old Man and the Sea is its combination of compression and depth. Like many of Hemingway’s early stories, the novel takes full advantage of the author’s widely imitated prose style­­a mixture of simple sentence structures, limited adjectives, and spare but suggestive description. As he himself explained in his examination of bullfighting in Death in the Afternoon, good writing should in some ways resemble an iceberg. That is to say, only one eighth of it appears above water. The rest is implied, and a careful reader will pick up on it and feel the weight of its presence. The writer who truly knows a subject should be able to leave much of the content or meaning unstated, and the reader “will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.” The Old Man and the Sea offers a deceptively simple surface story of an aging fisherman who catches a great fish, only to lose him to marauding sharks. The fable­like simplicity of the plot may yield broader symbolic meanings. The Old Man and the Sea presents a fundamentally human problem in graceful form and language, proposing not an answer to the limits of individual existence, but a way of facing those limits with grace and dignity.

Here are some things you can do while you are reading to help yourself read more effectively. 1. Consider the possibility that Santiago could be considered to be a Christ figure. Find some support for this idea. Write these lines down, so you can quote them and explain your answer. 2. Find some good passages where you have a hero confronting an overwhelming natural force. 3. Find some passages that show the father­son relationship between Santiago and the young boy. 4. Why does this boy love the old man so much? 5. What could the sharks be a symbol of? Explain and support your answer. 6. Notice that the villagers, who have mocked the old man, give him a grudging respect by the end of the novel. Find a passage that proves this idea. 7. “The old man was dreaming about lions.” What might the lions symbolize? 8. The old man was, at first, very proud to have caught the great fish. At what point do his feelings change? How would you describe this change? Quote a passage the proves what you say. 9. Now that you have read this book, try to make a list of the qualities that Hemingway would admire in a person­­man or woman. Be ready to defend your answer.