Hemingway’s concise style of writing had a great influence on modern literature. His unique writing style is also evident in The Old Man and the Sea. This article examines the characteristics and meaning of the work.
Considered one of the greatest masterpieces of 20th-century American literature, The Old Man and the Sea is a relatively simple story told in a novella. It is a story about an old fisherman named Santiago, who is poor and unlucky, who goes fishing far out to sea and catches the biggest fish of his life, but in the process of fighting for the fish, he smells the blood of the fish that has been shed and is attacked by a school of sharks, which eventually leaves him with nothing but his bones.
There is no particular twist or conflict in “The Old Man and the Sea.” The content is simple and there are only two main characters. If you read the original book without any prior knowledge, you might mistake it for a fairy tale because of the easy and simple words and sentences, as well as the title, “The Old Man and the Sea.” That is why many people say that “The Old Man and the Sea” is “a novel that can be easily fooled.” Because of the simple and easy vocabulary and sentences, I thought it was an easy work, and I was surprised by the lingering impression of the work when I turned the last page.
“The Old Man and the Sea” is the best-known work of Hemingway. Hemingway published seven full-length novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works during his lifetime, and three full-length novels, four short story collections, and three non-fiction works were published after his death. Among these many works, Hemingway asserted that “The Old Man and the Sea” was “the best masterpiece I could ever write in my lifetime.” The Swedish Academy also cited Hemingway’s phenomenal narrative technique and “his profound influence on the style of modern literature” as the reasons for selecting him as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The inspiration for Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” dates back to April 1936. That year, Hemingway published an essay in the magazine “Esquire” under the theme of “The story of an old fisherman who went out alone on a small boat to the open sea off Cuba and caught a huge marlin, but was dragged for two days.” The old fisherman in this essay caught a huge fish, but had to deal with a school of sharks that came after the blood scent, and eventually returned to port with only about 400 kilograms of fish left, with half of the flesh missing.
Two years later, Hemingway began writing “The Old Man and the Sea” based on this material, but he stopped writing due to the Spanish Civil War that broke out at the time, and he was writing a full-length novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” “For Whom the Bell Tolls” was published in 1940 and was so successful that it was considered for the 1941 Pulitzer Prize, but Hemingway was unable to produce any notable works for the next ten years. Then, in 1950, he published ‘Across the River and Into the Trees,’ which was not only critically panned, but he was told that his career as a writer was over. Hemingway began writing “The Old Man and the Sea” again with the determination to produce a masterpiece that would prove that he was not finished as a writer, and completed the work in a year and published it in 1952. Therefore, it took him 16 years from the idea to the completion of the novel.
Hemingway first published the novel in Life, a photography magazine. This was the first time a world-renowned author had published a new work in a magazine before publishing it in a book. The Life magazine in which the novel was published sold out of 5.3 million copies in just two days after it went on sale, and the paperback edition, which was published a few days later, sold 153,000 copies, becoming an instant bestseller.
Some critics criticized the book for its overly sentimental plot, its characters that feel more like philosophers than old fishermen, and its overt Christian symbolism, but Hemingway’s unique style and mature outlook on life, expressed through his masterful narrative techniques, earned him numerous readers and critics who called it his greatest masterpiece. In addition, with this work, Hemingway dispelled all the pessimistic views that “he is finished as a writer.”
When you read “The Old Man and the Sea,” you will immediately notice Hemingway’s unique narrative technique and style, which is always mentioned when discussing the book. Hemingway’s writing style, which was clearly distinguished from that of his contemporaries, such as James Joyce, who was famous for his esoteric sentences, and William Cuthbert Faulkner, who was famous for his long and complex sentences that were so long that they made it into the Guinness Book of Records, was so unique that it even gave rise to the term “Hemingwayesque.” His sentences are strong, concise, and dry. It is characterized by short, solid sentences created by using words sparingly and frugally without any excess. Hemingway-esque sentences are often called “Hard-Boiled Style.” This style of writing is characterized by the fact that it is written in a concise and dry manner, mainly from a third-person perspective, excluding emotional descriptions and various adjectives. In particular, Hemingway deliberately chose only the most basic and easiest words among several words with similar meanings.
This unique narrative technique of Hemingway is due to the fact that he was a journalist and a war correspondent. After graduating from high school, Hemingway did not go on to college but worked as a reporter for The Kansas City Star, and the principles of writing articles he learned at that time formed the basis for his Hemingway-esque writing style.
There is a famous anecdote in which Faulkner, who is known for his esoteric and complex style, one day said of Hemingway, “A writer who never uses a word that his readers have to look up in the dictionary,” to which Hemingway replied, “Do you think that only by using big words can you evoke big emotions?”
The debate between these two artists suggests many things. At that time, English and American literary works were dominated by long, complex, and abstruse styles that used many grandiose words and expressions, so readers had to look up the dictionary several times when reading the book, let alone understand the content clearly. In this literary reality, Hemingway changed the literary world with his strong and concise style and had a great influence on the English and American literary world.
Writing in an easy and simple way is something that anyone can easily follow, but Hemingway has perfected a narrative technique that captures the vivid sense of momentum that unfolds moment by moment, with concrete and poetic images and a sense of rhythm, as well as the inner thoughts and character traits that are not expressed in words. Hemingway said that he wrote “The Old Man and the Sea” based on the “Iceberg Principle.” Only one-eighth of the novel is written, while the remaining seven-eighths are submerged below the surface without being expressed in writing. This “locked part” that makes up the majority of the novel involves readers using their imagination to find it on their own, thereby involving them in the process of completing the novel.
As you read the novel, you will notice that the perspective of the novel is also unique. Basically, “The Old Man and the Sea” is narrated from beginning to end in a third-person limited point of view. The main characters also use the pronouns “old man” and “boy” instead of the names “Santiago” and “Manolin.” In particular, the beginning and end, which deal with what is happening on land, are from the perspective of a third-person limited point of view, and only observe and describe external facts from the position of an external observer with an objective attitude.
However, in the scene where the old man fights with a small boat alone in the open sea, he constantly monologues, making use of the effects of a first-person novel while using a third-person limited point of view. The elderly are constantly talking to themselves, and their soliloquies are rarely punctuated with commas or quotation marks, so they are slightly veiled as an internal monologue and a form of limited stream of consciousness.
When asked about the symbolism of fiction, Hemingway once said, “The sea is just the sea, the old man is just the old man, and the shark is just the shark. It is neither more nor less.” In other words, he did not intentionally give symbolism to this novel. However, there are many Christian images in The Old Man and the Sea.
The old man is depicted as a martyr, with the shape of the wound on his palm from the fishing line as he struggles with the fish, and the old fisherman Santiago, who is willing to sacrifice his life in the struggle with the fish he considers his “brother” despite the extreme pain he endures. When a school of sharks arrives, the old man screams like he is about to be impaled by a nail that passes through the palm of his hand and into the wooden board behind it, and when he carries the mast up to the hut on the hill, he is reminiscent of the image of Jesus carrying the cross up the hill of Calvary. The image of an old man lying on his back in his house also resembles the image of Jesus, who was crucified.
The names of the main characters in “The Old Man and the Sea” also match the main characters in the Bible. The name of the old man, Santiago, and the fellow fisherman Pedro, who gave him the head of the fish he caught, are Spanish names that correspond to James and Peter, who were fishermen among the twelve disciples of Jesus in the Bible. Manolin also means “savior” in Spanish.
Hemingway is an American writer who, along with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Stearns Eliot, represents the “Lost Generation.” The “lost generation,” referring to young people in their 20s and 30s who spent their youth directly or indirectly experiencing World War I, became disillusioned after experiencing the senseless deaths of countless people, and were mentally and physically scarred, losing faith in traditional values such as courage, patriotism, and masculinity, and wandering aimlessly, focusing on material wealth. In the literary world, writers of this generation left the United States and became active mainly in Paris, where they became immersed in existentialism and nihilism. These two philosophies, rooted in the works of S. Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, also influenced Hemingway’s work, and a sense of emptiness and futility runs throughout his early works. However, in his last published masterpiece, “The Old Man and the Sea,” Hemingway shows a mature view of life on the tragic irony of human destiny through an old fisherman who overcomes difficulties with indomitable will and “does not lose even if he is destroyed.”
Hemingway, who enjoyed drinking, hunting, and sports to an extreme degree and had a history of philandering with women, wrote works that mainly featured protagonists with the temperaments that were traditionally considered masculine values, such as courage and perseverance. These protagonists, called “Hemingway’s code heroes,” avoid bravado and live a simple life, focusing on the problems at hand and showing courage, will, patience, and action that are not shaken by external events. The protagonist of “The Old Man and the Sea,” Santiago is a typical example of Hemingway’s “code hero,” but he is different from the protagonists of his previous works.
While the protagonists in previous works have formed a confrontation and conflict structure between humans in the context of a civilized world such as Europe or Spain, “The Old Man and the Sea” forms a confrontation structure between humans and nature in the context of the primitive New World of the Americas. Moreover, the elderly man struggles alone against a large fish that represents nature in this vast sea.
But for Santiago, nature is not something to be conquered by humans. Santiago is a person who recognizes the sense of unity with nature, conforms to the natural order, and has a sense of awe for nature. The artist’s view of nature is reflected in the compassion and love that the old man shows to the fragile whistling birds, sea turtles, and a pair of marlin he caught in the past, and in his regret at having no choice but to kill the fish he considers his “brothers.”
Samuel Johnson, a British poet and critic, said that it takes a hundred years to determine whether a writer will be remembered forever. Only by viewing a work of art in isolation from the artist’s life or the historical context in which it was created can we properly assess whether it has the potential to become an immortal masterpiece. Hemingway has not yet passed away for a hundred years, but he has established himself as a representative American writer of the 20th century. This is probably because Hemingway’s unique style of writing has had a profound impact on modern Anglo-American literature, and his works continue to resonate with readers in any era, in any place, and in any environment.
