The Old Man and the Sea---the old man,a looser or a winner

Understanding of The Old Man and the Sea

This essay is related to the American famous novelist Hemingway's novel The Old Man and the Sea. The essay involves the writing background of The Old Man and the Sea; a brief introduction of the author Hemingway; the brief summary of the story and my understanding of the story.

1. The background of The Old Man and the Sea

Hemingway's novelette tells of the Cuban fisherman Santiago who for 84 luckless days has rowed his skiff into the Gulf Stream in quest of marlin. Aged and solitary, he goes far out and hooks a great fish. As he sails slowly homewards sharks attack his catch and he keeps fighting them. When he makes land his marlin is but a skeleton. Yet the old man remains proud in defeat.(1)

2. A brief introduction of the author

Ernest Hemingway was born in the year 1899, in Oak Park and committed suicide for unbearable torments from illness in the year 1961, in Idaho. He started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.(2)

Hemingway's point of view was shaped by his experience as a young man in the First World War, and his near death on the battle field. Many of his stories dealt with war or injury, and nearly all of them examined the nature of courage. His exploration of courage took many forms. He wrote about courage as 'an instinctive movement toward or away from the center of violence, with

self-preservation and self-respect the mixed motives.' He denied the romantic idea that courage was a noble emotion which could govern a man's action or prepare him to perform a brave act. He also wrote about the courage with which men face the tragedies of life that can never be remedied. His typical hero is one who , wounded but strong, enjoys the pleasures of life (sex, alcohol, sport) in face of ruin and death and maintains, through some notion of a code, an ideal of himself.

Under the influence of Mark Twain and with the help of Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound, Hemingway developed a new colloquial style characterized by directness, freshness, simplicity, and apparent naturalness. Hemingway always managed to choose words concrete, specific, common, casual and conversational, and employ them often in a syntax of short, simple sentence, which are orderly and patterned, conversational, and sometimes ungrammatical. But his style is deliberate and polished and never natural as it seems to be, and its simplicity can be disastrously deceptive, as it is highly suggestive and connotative and capable of offering layers of undercurrents of meaning.(4)

During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.

Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his