Hemingway profoundly influenced modern literature with his concise prose. His distinctive writing style shines through in The Old Man and the Sea. This article examines its characteristics and the meaning embedded within the work.
The Old Man and the Sea, considered one of the greatest masterpieces by Ernest Hemingway, a representative author of 20th-century American literature, is a novella with a relatively simple plot. It tells the story of Santiago, an impoverished and unlucky old fisherman who ventures far out to sea and catches the biggest fish of his life. However, during his struggle to land the giant fish, the scent of its blood attracts a pack of sharks. Ultimately, he returns to port with only the fish’s bare bones remaining.
『The Old Man and the Sea』 contains no special twists or conflicts. Its content is simple, and it features only two main characters. Reading the original text without prior knowledge, one might mistake it for a fairy tale, not only because of the title 『The Old Man and the Sea』, but also due to its easy, simple words and sentences. Because of this, many people call 『The Old Man and the Sea』 “a novel that can easily fool you.” It’s because readers, thinking it’s an easy piece due to its overly simple vocabulary and sentences, are surprised by the lingering resonance the work leaves only after closing the final page.
The Old Man and the Sea is widely recognized as Hemingway’s finest work among his own writings. During his lifetime, Hemingway published seven novels, six short story collections, and two nonfiction works. After his death, three more novels, four additional short story collections, and three nonfiction works were published. Among this vast body of work, Hemingway declared The Old Man and the Sea to be “the finest work I could ever hope to write.” The Swedish Academy cited his extraordinary narrative technique and “the profound influence on the style of modern literature” as the reasons for selecting Hemingway as the Nobel Prize in Literature laureate.
The impetus for Hemingway to write The Old Man and the Sea dates back to April 1936. That year, he published an essay in Esquire magazine titled “The Story of an Old Man Who Went Out Alone in a Small Boat into the Deep Sea of Cuba and Caught a Big Blue Marlin, but Was Dragged Along for Two Days.” The old fisherman in this essay did catch the enormous fish, but he had to contend with a pack of sharks drawn by the scent of blood. Ultimately, he returned to port hauling a fish that had lost half its flesh, leaving only about four hundred kilograms remaining.
Two years later, Hemingway began writing The Old Man and the Sea based on this experience, but he paused the project to write the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War that had just erupted. *For Whom the Bell Tolls* was published in 1940 and achieved such great success that it was considered for the 1941 Pulitzer Prize. However, Hemingway failed to produce any significant work for the next ten years. Then, in 1950, he published Across the River and into the Trees, which was not only harshly criticized by critics but also led to claims that his career as a writer was over. Driven by the determination to prove he was not finished as a writer, Hemingway began writing The Old Man and the Sea. He completed the work within a year, publishing it in 1952. Thus, the novel took sixteen years from conception to completion.
Hemingway first published this novel in the photography magazine Life. This marked the first time a world-renowned author published a new work in a magazine before releasing it as a book. The issue of Life featuring the novel sold out completely within two days of hitting newsstands, with 5.3 million copies gone. The book version, published a few days later, sold 153,000 copies and became an instant bestseller, achieving tremendous success.
While some critics pointed to its overly sentimental plot, its artificial characterization of the old fisherman—who felt more like a philosopher—and its overt Christian symbolism, Hemingway’s original style in The Old Man and the Sea, along with the mature outlook on life conveyed through his masterful narrative technique, elicited responses from countless readers and critics that it was the finest masterpiece among Hemingway’s works. Furthermore, with this work, Hemingway completely dispelled all pessimistic views that “he was finished as a writer.”
Hemingway’s unparalleled narrative technique and style, invariably mentioned when discussing The Old Man and the Sea, are immediately apparent when reading the work in its original language. Distinctly different from his contemporaries like James Joyce, famously known for his complex sentences, or William Cuthbert Faulkner, renowned for his long, convoluted sentences worthy of the Guinness Book of World Records, Hemingway’s prose was so uniquely distinctive at the time that the term “Hemingwayesque” was coined. His sentences are robust, concise, and dry. His writing is characterized by solid, short sentences crafted with meticulous and economical use of words, completely free of superfluous elements. Hemingway-esque writing is often called the ‘Hard-Boiled Style’. This style excludes emotional descriptions and superfluous modifiers, typically written concisely and dryly from a third-person perspective. Hemingway deliberately chose only the most basic and simplest words from among several synonyms with similar meanings.
This unique narrative technique stems from Hemingway’s background as a journalist and war correspondent. After graduating high school, he skipped college to work as a reporter for The Kansas City Star. The principles of news writing he learned there formed the foundation of his distinctive style.
There is a famous anecdote about Faulkner, renowned for his obscure and complex style, once describing Hemingway as “a writer who never uses a word that a reader must look up in the dictionary.” Hemingway retorted, “Do you think you have to use big words to evoke big emotions?”
This debate between the two writers is highly suggestive. At that time, the dominant style in Anglo-American literature was long, complex, and obscure, laden with grand words and expressions. Readers often had to consult dictionaries repeatedly while reading, and even grasping the content clearly was difficult. Within this literary reality, Hemingway changed the course of the literary world with his robust and concise style, exerting a profound influence on Anglo-American literature.
Writing simply and plainly is something anyone can easily imitate, but Hemingway perfected a narrative technique that infused concrete, poetic imagery and rhythm into this simplicity. He captured the vivid, palpable tension unfolding moment by moment, and conveyed unspoken inner thoughts and the characters’ very essence. Hemingway described The Old Man and the Sea as written according to the ‘Iceberg Principle’. Only one-eighth of the story is visible on the surface; the remaining seven-eighths remain unwritten, submerged beneath the surface. This ‘submerged portion,’ which occupies the majority of the novel, draws readers into the process of completing the story by compelling them to use their imagination to discover it themselves.
As you read, feeling the distinctiveness of the sentences, you also come to appreciate the unique narrative perspective. Fundamentally, The Old Man and the Sea is narrated from a third-person limited perspective from beginning to end. The main characters are referred to not by their names, ‘Santiago’ or ‘Manolin,’ but by the pronouns ‘the old man’ and ‘the boy.’ Particularly in the opening and closing sections dealing with events on land, the limited third-person perspective adopts an objective stance from an external observer’s position, observing and describing only external facts.
However, in the scenes where the Old Man battles the fish alone in his small boat on the open sea, the narrative adopts the form of the Old Man’s constant soliloquy. This allows the use of the third-person limited perspective while still achieving the effect of a first-person novel. The old man speaks incessantly to himself, and his soliloquies, with almost no commas or quotation marks, subtly shift into an internal monologue and a form of limited stream of consciousness.
When asked about the novel’s symbolism, Hemingway stated, “The sea is just the sea, the old man is just the old man, and the shark is just the shark—nothing more, nothing less.” That is, he did not intentionally imbue this novel with symbolism. However, Christian imagery is frequently found in The Old Man and the Sea.
The shape of the wound on the old man’s palm, cut by the fishing line as he battles the fish, and Santiago’s willingness to sacrifice his life in the struggle against the fish he regards as his ‘brother’—even while enduring extreme pain—portray the old fisherman as a martyr-like figure. When the sharks arrive, the old man lets out a scream that could have come from someone whose “nail had gone through his palm and into the wooden board behind his hand.” Carrying the mast up the hill to his hut evokes the image of Jesus bearing the cross up to Calvary. The old man’s figure, lying prostrate upon returning home, also resembles the image of Jesus nailed to the cross.
The names of the main characters in 『The Old Man and the Sea』 also correspond to key figures in the Bible. The old man’s name, ‘Santiago,’ and his fellow fisherman ‘Federico,’ who gave him the fish’s head, are Spanish versions of the names of the fishermen among Jesus’ twelve disciples, ‘James’ and ‘Peter.’ ‘Manolin’ also means ‘Savior’ in Spanish.
Hemingway is an American writer representing the “Lost Generation” alongside F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Stearns Eliot. The “Lost Generation” refers to young people in their 20s and 30s who lived through World War I, either directly or indirectly. Having witnessed countless meaningless deaths, they became disillusioned, mentally and physically scarred, lost faith in traditional values like courage, patriotism, and masculinity, and drifted aimlessly while fixating on material wealth. In the literary world, writers of this generation left America and became active primarily in Paris, becoming immersed in existentialism and nihilism. These two philosophies, rooted in the works of S. Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, also influenced Hemingway’s literary world; a sense of emptiness and futility permeates his early works. However, in his final major work, The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway presents a mature perspective on the tragic irony of human destiny. Through the old fisherman who overcomes adversity with indomitable will, “broken but not defeated,” he reveals a profound understanding of life.
Hemingway, who was known for his excessive drinking, hunting, sports, and womanizing, primarily featured protagonists embodying traditionally masculine values like courage and endurance in his works. These protagonists, often called ” Hemingway’s code heroes“ shun pretension, live simple yet fulfilling lives, focus intently on immediate challenges, and demonstrate courage, resolve, endurance, and decisiveness unshaken by external events. Santiago, the protagonist of The Old Man and the Sea, exemplifies this ”code hero” archetype, yet he differs from protagonists in Hemingway’s earlier works.
Whereas protagonists in earlier works were set against the backdrop of civilized worlds like Europe or Spain, forming structures of human-versus-human conflict and confrontation, The Old Man and the Sea is set against the primal backdrop of the New World’s American sea, forming a structure of man versus nature. Moreover, the old man battles alone against a giant fish, a symbol of nature itself, within the vast ocean representing the great natural world.
Yet for Santiago, nature is not an object to be conquered. He is a man who recognizes his oneness with nature, conforms to its natural order, and holds reverence for it. The author’s view of nature is evident in the old man’s compassion and love shown to the fragile whistling bird, the sea turtle, and the pair of bluefish he caught in the past, as well as his regret at having to kill the fish he considers his “brother.” This prompts reflection on the inescapable conditions of survival in life, where one must live in harmony with nature.
The British poet and critic Samuel Johnson said that a hundred years are needed to judge whether a writer will be remembered forever. Only by viewing the work completely detached from the author’s life or historical context can one properly assess whether it possesses the value to become an immortal masterpiece. Hemingway has not yet reached his hundredth anniversary, yet he has secured his place as a defining American writer of the 20th century. This is due not only to the profound influence his distinctive style exerted on modern Anglo-American literature, but also because his works continue to offer fresh emotional resonance to readers across all eras, locations, and circumstances.
