The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway

There is compassion, empathy and pity in its pages.

pp.109
Published: Triad/Panther Books, 1976 (1952)

We all know about Hemingway’s style, anyway, so I won‘t dwell. This is no major exception from his other work in that sense. It is shorter than his novels, reading more like one of his longer short stories, but the simple sentence structures and straightforward narrative are all recognizable as stalwart features of Hemingway. So too is the ostentatious courage and ‘hard-man’ quality of the protagonist, the eponymous ‘old man’, who really lacks any complex characterization, Hemingway preferring to create simple, ‘elementary’ characters, as the NY Times put it in the ‘50s, who symbolize a particular belief or way of thinking or way of life.
 
The immense feat of physical endurance is all predictable Hemingway, as our old man attempts to pull in the biggest fish of his life after eighty-four fruitless days of fishing in his little humble skiff. The matter-of-fact violence of the fish’s death and of the subsequent shark attacks on the boat are Hemingway through and through.

But the deviation in style is perhaps the reason for this novel’s mention by the Nobel Prize Committee two years later when Hemingway received the award. For there is compassion, empathy and pity in its pages. There is a meditative feeling, despite all the violence and physical exertion, that all things in the natural world are one. The old man talks to his fish, even as it swims metres below the surface of the ocean attached to his fishing line. He croons ‘Come on, fish,’ and ‘Don‘t jump’. There is a brotherhood between hunter and hunted. ‘I have killed this fish which is my brother’, says the old man, certain of the divine comradeship.

He is similarly enamoured of the bond he feels with the sharks, even though they follow the scent of his long-fought-for catch and they mean to eat it, to take his prize, and indeed his pride, from him. They are ‘beautiful and noble and know no fear of anything.’ He is impressed by their courage, which he shares, and by the courage of the fish, which had put up such a gallant fight in the first place. In other words, he empathises with their struggle, with their courage in the face of death, which is what life is all about.
 
Empathy is what propels this novella above much of Hemingway’s work, or, in Faulkner’s terms, it is the fact that Hemingway found a God, a creator who ‘made them all [the characters] and loved them all and pitied them all’. It is beautiful in its understanding attitude, and despite the artificiality of the old man, who speaks often in worn clichés and with a lack of affect, it excels on numerous levels. It is atmospheric, vast, and potent as an allegory of the human condition. This is the Hemingway we know and love, yet a Hemingway distilled and refined, as much as is possible, into a necessary work of a length that suit’s the man’s writing.