Hemingway's Classic Essay

On First Reading Hemingway’s Classic

During my vacations, I went back to my childhood home near Darjeeling without much luggage, barring one significant item, a very short novel by an author I had only heard good things about and not experienced much of his artistry. More so because pop culture even in the 21st century, refers to this man, his writing style and temperament which inevitably sought a lot of attention towards it.

Ernest Hemingway is the man in question, and at the time I was carrying a copy of one of his best known work The Old Man and the Sea. Simply because of my counting of the number of pages and disregarding everything else, the short novel, of less than hundred pages, which wasn’t so daunting at first, took me ten days

Yet, it is true that Hemingway’s style is characterized by masculine brevity and precise expression. Even the most vague and abstract ideas are presented with astonishing clarity. But what seemed most remarkable to me is the smoothness with which his style puts on the cloak of clarity, where in fact he is talking about things which are really deep and cannot be simplified while analysing them. So, what struck me most was the garb of clarity, or as I read somewhere, a ‘deceptive clarity’.

So, most people think of the novel as a tale of human toil and suffering, more often than not with little result; but what seems to come across after a close reading is how the story is an effective metaphor for life itself. In the early sections, the old man is described as an unlucky fisherman, whom other fishermen saw as ‘salao’. The earnest boy acting as his apprentice, Manolin, is forbidden to sail with him as everyone agrees that little good will happen for him if he sails with that terribly unlucky, old fisherman. And so, Santiago, the old man, our protagonist, must set out alone to face the sea and its challenges. For days the old man slogged in vain before setting sail again, hoping