The Old Man and the Sea in Reading the Classics

Jan 04, 2015 Jibran rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 100-works-of-world-lit, nobel

My big fish must be somewhere.

Many years ago when I read The Old Man and the Sea I thought it was going nowhere, that it was too simple and ordinary to be of any consequence. On a second reading, however, my view changed and I ended up loving it. What I mistook for repetition was a literary device for emphasis and the boat, like the story, that I judged to be unmoving in the rolling seas was caught in a whirlpool churning the waters in its depth so that the boat and the old man at the sea were n My big fish must be somewhere.

Many years ago when I read The Old Man and the Sea I thought it was going nowhere, that it was too simple and ordinary to be of any consequence. On a second reading, however, my view changed and I ended up loving it. What I mistook for repetition was a literary device for emphasis and the boat, like the story, that I judged to be unmoving in the rolling seas was caught in a whirlpool churning the waters in its depth so that the boat and the old man at the sea were never at rest till the end.

Although grounds for comparison do not exist, reading this novella, Orhan Pamuk came to mind. It's their ability to weave the many similar threads of narrative into a stunning improvisatory whole that turns a small, and prima facie simple, scenario that might be covered in a few pages into an expanded mass of words that transcends the boundaries of its immediate context to inform on larger human struggle. Repetition or artistic improvisation, when done well, is fascinating and here Orhan Pamuk and Ernest Hemingway appear brothers-in-arms. You start with a pin prick of a view that widens and opens out into a wide vista giving you a clear view of the clutter of human ethos.

Like his so many stories it's a tale of a heroic struggle but only inasmuch as a frail-legged ant suffers to get a tiny lump of sugar to its colony to claim its superiority on the lesser types. A knackered old man dreaming on the seas of a big catch in a boat fit for the axe of a lumberjack with a young boy for a helper do not evoke the romantic world of heroic battles fought by the gun-wielding machismo of Hemingway's other stories. This is something simpler in its setting yet more profound in its humanistic import.

A piece of writing - a prose story or a poem - becomes great because it has no single, fixed, literal meaning that forbids imagination. It is the reader who picks up the idea consistent with the subjective conditions of his own worldview, interpreting the text, changing it, and then getting changed by it in turn. This novella lends itself to interpretation on multiple levels and, for its rich imagery of natural elements and human emotions, remains one of the very best Hemingway offered us.

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