For Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea was more than just a story about the sea. It may have contained deep messages about his literary reflections and life.
Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899-1961) was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, United States.
His father was an obstetrician and gynecologist who enjoyed hunting and fishing, and his mother was a religious woman who loved music.
He spent his summers with his father, who loved to fish and hunt, at their vacation home on the shores of Lake Walloon in northern Michigan. More like his father than his introverted mother, Hemingway’s hobbies and interests in football, swimming, boxing, music, hunting, and literature during his high school years gave him a wide range of experiences that would later become a consistent thread in his work.
In 1918, at the age of 19, while serving as a Red Cross worker on the Italian front, he was seriously wounded and spent three months in the Milan Army Hospital before returning to the front. His war experience became the basis for A Farewell to Arms.
In 1921, at the age of 22, he married Hadley Richardson and lived in Toronto. In December of that year, he settled in Paris as European correspondent for the Star Weekly.
In 1922, he was introduced to Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound by Sherwood Anderson, who were to have an enormous influence on Hemingway in his formative years.
In 1923, he published his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, in Paris.
In 1926, he published The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises. In 1927, he published Men Without Women, which was well received by readers.
In 1929, he published A Farewell to Arms, which sold 80,000 copies in four months and became an instant hit.
In 1932, he published Death in the Afternoon, in 1933, Winner Take Nothing, and in 1935, The Green Hills of Africa.
In 1936, at the age of 37, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and he worked to raise money for government military aid, publishing that year the African-themed short story and .
In 1937, at the age of 38, he traveled to Spain to collaborate on a film called . To Have and Have not was published in October of that year. In 1940, he published For Whom The Bell Tolls, which became a bestseller, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. In 1946, he married Mary Welsh for the fourth time, and in 1950, he published Across the River and into the Trees.
In 1952, at the age of 53, he published The Old Man and the Sea, which won him the 1953 Pulitzer Prize.
In January 1954, he was injured in an airplane crash in Uganda, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature that year.
In 1961, at the age of 62, he committed a mysterious shotgun suicide at his Idaho home, where he was being treated for high blood pressure and diabetes. His death drew unusual tributes from the White House, the Vatican Palace, and the Kremlin.
Hemingway was a representative of the “Lost generation” of the 1920s, a writer who shifted from a negative to a positive attitude toward life, and after publishing To Have and Have not and then For Whom The Bell Tolls in 1940, he remained silent for a decade, possibly because his biographical novels were not well received and he felt compelled to write fiction since his literary world had shifted from a negative to a positive attitude.
Then, in the 1950s, Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea, which redeemed his reputation by dispelling the critics’ claims of a creative decline.
The Old Man and the Sea (1952) is the crown jewel of Hemingway’s literary oeuvre, summarizing his morals about literature and life.
According to Kit Singer, who discovered the story’s source material, Hemingway based it on a fisherman he met on a dock. The main character, Santiago, is a real-life fisherman named Manuel Ulivari Montespan. He defected from Cuba to the United States in 1963. The fact that Hemingway rewrote the story more than 200 times before publishing it shows how much effort he put into perfecting it. The author himself once said of The Old Man and the Sea, “I feel like I’ve been working on it all my life and I’ve just finished it.”
“The Old Man and the Sea” was hailed by The New York Times as ‘a masterpiece by a master,’ and there are several things that make it so special.
First, you can find the author’s profound ideas about life in it.
The plot of the work is just a simple fishing episode, but we are deeply impressed by the old man Santiago, who refuses to admit defeat and races on with an indomitable spirit. The old man struggles with a large fish and wins, but is unexpectedly attacked by a school of sharks and taken away, leaving nothing but a wreckage (殘骸), but the old man has no regrets. He only sleeps for tomorrow. For the old man, life is meaningless and futile, but he obeys the laws of nature for the sake of tomorrow, and for him, there can be no defeat.
Our lives may be like a fisherman fishing with a flimsy boat on a ruined sea, but if we persevere in the face of any hardship, we will never be defeated in life.
In this work, we discover the true humanity of the old man Santiago, who is racing against human hardships. This is the artist’s fundamental idea.
Second, we can find a wealth of symbolism in it.
From the old man and the boy to the sea, clouds, dolphins, sharks, baseball players, lions, and other sea creatures, there are many deep meanings in them.
The sea is the world we live in, and the old man represents us. In the boy who takes care of the old man, we see humanity, and in the baseball game and the baseball player, we see human interdependence and the indomitable spirit that endures suffering. In the lions playing on the sunset beach, he sees purity of power and peace.
The old man sees all the creatures of the sea on an equal footing with humans and sees all objects on the same level as humans. Even the wind, the bed, the stars, the sun, and the moon are considered brothers. This is the extreme point of the artist’s universal love. Even though he feels love and respect for the big fish, he feels that it is the law of nature that he has to kill it. The artist’s spirit of pan-love is recognized within the bounds of tolerating the laws of nature, which shows his ethical side.
Finally, we can point out the concise and focused prose style.
Most of the sentences are colloquial, characterized by simplicity of diction and sentence structure. The words are short and plain, and the use of vocabulary is extremely economical and fresh. The author reread this work 200 times before deciding to write it. His mastery is evident in the vividness with which he weaves the story together, without neglecting a single word.
