Compare And Contrast In The Old Man And Big Fish By Ernest Hemingway

Telling a story is about feeling like your listener understands. Different people have different ways of making sure that they are understood; so, they tell stories with their own perspective. In the Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, a man named Santiago tells a small boy named Manolin many stories about his life. Likewise, in Big Fish by Tim Burton, William learns more and more about his father, Edward, through a series of stories about his life. When one person listens to a story they have no idea if what they are listening to is true. They weren’t there and they didn’t have the experience of living through it. Many people tell stories as an exaggeration or a tall tale. Some have a personal storytelling preference, whether they are

The reader knows exactly what is true because he tells the story precisely, even though the tourists at the end of the story do not. For example, Santiago’s descriptions of the marlin are explicit: “[The marlin’s tail] was higher than a big scythe blade and very pale lavender above the dark blue water” (90). In this description the details are specific and not exaggerated. In Big Fish, neither the viewers nor the characters know what is true and what is not because the story is told in a series of smaller stories. Edward tells his stories in an exaggerated way. Edward likes to embellish his stories instead of strictly sticking to the facts. These “tall tales” are told in his perspective of how he feels he is living through them. Edward begins to explain, “With these two hands, I reached in and snatched that fish out of the river. I looked him straight in the eye…” and later Will is clarifying to his wife, Josephine the truth about his father 's stories, “It doesn’t always make sense, and most of it never happened”. Edward wants to feel understood so he exaggerates his stories so his son Will interprets them to be not true. Unlike Edward, Santiago tells his stories with the truth proving that people tell stories with different perspective to feel