"The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway

William Faulkner oncetried to insult Ernest Hemingway by saying that he 'has never beenknown to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary'.Hemingway, however, did use some words that you would need to look upin the dictionary: a lot of fish names, for instance, and fishingtechniques. The problem is that they are not the kind of words youare eager to know the meaning of. The narrative, in fact, goes onsmoothly whether you know or not the kind of fish Hemingway istalking about.
“The Old Man and theSea” is the work that made Ernest Hemingway a celebrity but inspite of that it is a rather simple story: an old fisherman calledSantiago struggles to catch a very big merlin, à la Herman Melville,and the fight goes on for three days. Despite having refused companyfor the day, Santiago wishes a younger friend who usually takes goodcare of him would be there to help him. He knows that he is just anold man fighting a very stubborn fish, whom he however admires.Santiago shows an excellent knowledge of nature and of the sea. Hisstruggle for survival and his mind fixed towards his goal in spite ofseveral adversities is perhaps a parallel to the way one needs totreat life.
I am aware that there isa plethora of interpretations of this short novel and that Biblicalreferences apparently are of paramount importance. The way I see it,this novella might be partly autobiographical, at least from anallegorical point of view. “The Old Man and the Sea” can be seenas the will of an middle-aged writer (Hemingway was 52 and maybe already suffering of depression when he wrotethis) who has recently received some let-downs from his work but islooking for a last win before retiring. All the savvy and wisdom thatSantiago shows at sea may simply represent the skills a writer shoulduse to make his story work. All the talk in town about him being thegreatest fisherman in the world who has been struck by misfortune andhasn't caught a single fish in the last eighty-four days showsperhaps how big Hemingway's ego was at the end of his astonishingcareer (after all he would be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954). EvenManolin, the young man who has learned everything he knows aboutfishing from him and is ready to take his place, can be interpretedas a younger generation of writers who have learned from Hemingwayand are ready to continue his work and enrich American literatureeven further. “The Old Man and the Sea” is in fact the last workHemingway would publish and it comes after “Across the River andinto the Trees”, an ambitious novel that was critically andcommercially a disaster.
I must confess that Ihave never been a huge Hemingway fan. I had read passages of his workat school and found his writing too “economic”. He does notindulge on describing emotions and one may suffer from the lack oflyrical passages. Hemingway is down to earth and straightforward: hissentences are mostly made of actions and there are relatively fewadjectives. However, I liked the relationship of the old fishermanwith the natural world that surrounds him, his awareness of the placehe occupies within the natural world. I found the tale enriching infrom a spiritual, rather than literary, point of view (withoutrevealing too many details, the end of the novel is both a loss and awin). After all, what did Hemingway answer to Faulkner's provocation?He declared, not without wisdom: 'Poor Faulkner. Does he really thinkthat big emotions come from big words?'.