Ernest Hemingway revolutionized modern literature with his concise and powerful prose. His life and experiences, including the Spanish Civil War, shaped his work, and his stories capture the essence of human nature and life.
Hemingway’s literary world is a “valley of the shadow of death,” a place of violence and death. “Our time has become a world that will not be saved,” he writes, ”and we must look to God for salvation. This is not just end-of-the-century pessimism, by any means. According to the critic Wilson, Hemingway’s characters are “bullfighters, racehorse owners, gangsters, soldiers, prostitutes, drunks, drug dealers, and other human beings. It’s questionable whether all of his characters represent a cross-section of society.
Rather than representing a particular class or characteristic, it is better to think of them as more intensely depicting a peculiar aspect of human beings, both inner and outer. Furthermore, they are depicted as ‘natural people’ deprived of all mental and intellectual elements, as if they have lost human emotions such as love, remorse, or jealousy. Only animal and instinctive emotions dominate them, and everyone seems to live in a sensual world of greed, lust, and murder. Hemingway therefore uses a “hardboiled” style with few adjectives or modifiers to describe the instinctive, sensual world. It seemed inevitable to Hemingway that he would use a harsh style to describe harsh situations.
The harsh world of violence and death in which the characters find themselves is also Hemingway’s own world, the world of modern nihilism. Readers will have to try to discover for themselves what ethical claims Hemingway was trying to make in the modern wasteland of his works, or in a world that has denied all established religions and ethical standards.
Ernest Hemingway was born in July 1898 in a suburb of Chicago, the son of a doctor. His father was a wild man with a passion for hunting, fishing, and sports, while his mother was an intellectual who enjoyed music and reading. Hemingway inherited a complex temperament from both parents. However, the paternal side of his life and work is the stronger influence.
After graduating from high school, he tried to enlist in World War I, but was rejected due to poor eyesight. Not yet 18 years old, he got his first job as a journalist at The Kansas City Star. The following year, he was sent to the Italian front as a wounded soldier carrier. His first novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929), was the result of this experience. This work, along with the story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” also included in this volume, depicts Hemingway’s fear of death.
In other words, this harsh style was created to express the emptiness that runs beneath the surface of the work. The harsh world of violence and death that the characters inhabit is also Hemingway’s own world, the world of modern nihilism. Readers will have to try to discover what ethical arguments Hemingway was trying to make in the modern wasteland of his works, or in a world that has denied all established religions and ethical standards.
Hemingway lived in Key West, on Thompson Island at the tip of the Florida peninsula, from 1928 to 1938, where he led a wild life of fishing, hunting, boxing, and other sports. His works from this period include To Have and Have not) (1937), Green Hills of Africa, which is a dissipation of his travels in Africa, and The Short and Happy Life of Francis McCormack, which is considered the best of his later short stories. In 1936, he traveled to Spain, where he fought for the Spanish government forces and made a pact with French writer André Malraux to write a novel about the Spanish Civil War from a democratic perspective. André Malraux wrote Man’s Hope, and Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls. These works are extremely un-American in that they celebrate the totalitarian philosophy that the individual must be sacrificed for the good of the whole. Thus, we can see that Hemingway was a writer who always lived with the times, rather than insisting on his own ideas.
Afterward, the old man dreamed of a long beach shining with golden color. He saw some lions coming down to the dark beach in the early morning hours. Then other lions began to appear. The old man jammed his jaw on a foreign wooden plank. Anchored there, the boat was caught in a light breeze from the land. He waited to see if more lions would appear, and he was happy.
This is an excerpt from The Old Man and the Sea. What remained with Hemingway at the end of his life may have been the happiness that appeared in the old man’s dream, as shown in the passage above. We could call this a kind of Stoicism.
People often compare The Old Man and the Sea to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. The latter has symbols, but the former lacks them, and they seem to be tacked on. The latter has a philosophy, an epic narrative, and a strong personality, but Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea lacks all of those things, he says.
However, there is definitely a question as to whether this work should be considered a failure. Ideas, philosophies, and concepts are not favored. There is only the sea and the meat, the old man and the boy. The sea is the sea, the clouds are the clouds, and the flying fish are nothing other than flying fish. Hemingway is presenting a primitive human being who has no vague ideas and concepts other than the psychology that is directly related to his physical behavior and speech. The artist is clearly conscious of the self through this primitive man, the old man.
Again, in “The Old Man and the Sea” there are no ideas, concepts, symbols, or anything like that, except for physical behavior and the psychology directly connected to it. And at the end of the struggle, which is neither the old man’s final victory nor his defeat, there is a euphoria like a lion’s dream. If Stoicism is what Hemingway mastered after a long struggle with life and death, what would his suicide mean, even if it was an accidental misfired suicide?
Hemingway was filling a gaping hole in the modern world and society with physical and activist justice after all the negativity and emptiness. It was his only spiritual affirmation and modern ethic. In “The Old Man and the Sea,” Hemingway portrayed an ideal human being that his own subjectivity could recognize through a purely objective external description. That was Old Man Santiago.
