Mehreen Ahmed's Blog - Posts Tagged "david-tanager"

Besotted with the memory of 'Old James,' somewhat a reminder of 'Old man and the Sea', written in the same vein of a retrospective journey, it is a short story which alludes the reader. While Hemingway's old man made a decisive departure from a stalemated situation, Tanager's old James was raised from the ashes in an intangible tango towards a sense of an ending. In the soliloquies presented in the form of a dialogue between Junior and the old man - the proverbial Hamlet's ghost, junior gleans wisdom. Converging nevertheless on the idea of a struggle as a way to fulfillment is of the essence in both the 'old man' and 'old James'. The brilliant rhetoric engaged in the description of the storm is but a metaphorical pronouncement of physical strife, both short and sweet, as individuals teeter on the brink of life's crossroads between temporal and a metaphysical existence.