The Old Man and the Sea: Hemingway's Tragic Vision of Man

Abstract

IN Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway uses an effective metaphor to describe the kind of prose he is trying to write: he explains that a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.' Among all the works of Hemingway which illustrate this metaphor, none, I think, does so more consistently or more thoroughly than the saga of Santiago. Indeed, the critical reception of the novel has emphasized this aspect of it: in particular, Philip Young, Leo Gurko, and Carlos Baker have stressed the qualities of The Old Man and the Sea as allegory and parable.2 Each of these critics is especially concerned with two qualities in Santiago-his epic individualism and the love he feels for the creatures who share with him a world of inescapable violence-though in the main each views these qualities from a different point of the literary compass. Young regards the novel as essentially classical in nature;3 Gurko sees it as reflecting Hemingway's romanticism;4 and to Baker, the novel is Christian in context, and the old fisherman is suggestive of Christ.5 Such interpretations of The Old Man and the Sea are not, of course, contradictory; in fact, they are parallel at many points. All are true, and together they point to both the breadth and depth of the novel's enduring significance and also to its central greatness: