Ernest Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to analyze and explore Hemingway's exceptional work Old Man and the Sea. This paper aims to analyze Hemingway's work as it has left an unforgettable mark on the history. Born on July 21, 1895, in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway was the son of Clarence Hemingway, a physician who suffered from longtime depression and took his own life in 1928. The storyline and plain prose of this masterpiece invite a rapid reading for pleasure, but the risk then is not taking the novel seriously--by which I mean with full seriousness.

Hemingway's ideal audience consists of readers who pause over sentences and savor the spaces in between--the perfectly modulated sequences of notes and silences that Hemingway deploys as breathtakingly as the jazz geniuses Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis. "None of these scars were fresh," he writes of Santiago, "They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert." Hemingway gives the sense of wearing away in the sound of "old as erosions," and he implies that the scars are impossibly old, reaching backward to a desert that was once a sea. He reminds us of the span of time--which the sea in which the old man fishes will also eventually become a desert, boundless and bare.

Thesis Statement

The Old Man and the Sea presents diverse themes of harmony, courage and bravery that may inspire the audience and contribute towards societal welfare.

Body

The Old Man and the Sea has autobiographical overtones. Hemingway was an accomplished deep-sea fisherman and provides the reader with many details concerning the art of capturing marlins. (His big-game hunting and attending bullfights are obviously related activities) (Meyers, 89). It is not farfetched to equate Santiago's marlin with Hemingway's decades-long effort to write, to pull from the depths of his being, a vast book about the sea. Santiago's story was planned as a segment of a four-part novel, of which only it and Islands in the Stream, appearing posthumously in 1970, were completed. In this ambitious aesthetic adventure, the author tried to go too far (Rebollo, 61). It may be added that the sharks ravaging the marlin can be likened to Hemingway's critics — ever eager, in his almost psychotic view, to pick his writing apart. Just as Santiago calls his enemy his brother, so Hemingway, in capturing on the printed page an artwork of his creation, may be presenting his ...