Blog #125; Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea Re-considered

I am currently re-reading that 20^th C. classic, The Old Man and the Sea and plumbing the depths of the old master’s talent.  When a young man studying creative writing in Paris in the 1920s, the author famously said he wanted his readers, after finishing a book of his, to not be able to distinguish Hemingway’s well-crafted depictions and “felt-life” or an actual memory of a true experience.  Hemingway achieves this by painstaking selection of imagery (ie, description that appeals to the five senses).

 

While the old man is sailing the currents of the Caribbean outside Havana, Hemingway strategically places the reader right in the environment and experience.  The monumental fight with the marlin, the taste of the salt spray of the ocean water, the heat of the sun beating his exposed back, the ache of the muscles well past the point of failure.  Hemingway expresses the experience as only he can, and the reader’s experience of life is all the richer for it.