Ernest Hemingway-The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway is considered one the greatest American writers of not only his contemporaries but of all time. His iceberg theory style of writing, born on his time as a journalist, has influence on countless writers both amateur and professional. Clean sentences. Flat prose. He wrote what he wanted to say and nothing else.

Hemingway, despite his wide body of work of novels, short stories, and articles, is best known for four novels. These novels are of course The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and of course, The Old Man and the Sea. I consider the latter to be his best novel for several reasons. It's the pinnacle of his life, ideals, and theories. Old Man is his shortest novel, but it says the most about him. Most of Hemingway's novels follow protagonists of manliness, bravado, conviction, and honor. These ideals were of course important to Hemingway himself who threw himself into alcoholism, women, hunting, fishing, and the blood-sport of bullfighting.

Considered the pinnacle of men, Hemingway was born to a doting mother who for a good time of his life placed him in girl's clothes. Dresses and knickers and hats. It was popular fashion at the time, but young Hemingway resented this. It was his father who allowed him to wear men's clothes on their trips into the wilderness to hunt and fish and camp that Hemingway came into his own. As he grew up Hemingway discovered a knack for writing for his High School Newspaper and later joined the Kansas City Star at 17, and was given this style mandate:

• Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.
• Eliminate every superfluous word.
• Numbers less than 100 should be spelled out, except in matter of statistical nature, in ages, time of day, sums of money and comparative figures or dimensions.
• Do not use evidence as a verb.

This mandate and his larger than life adventures would become the backbone for his literary works. Hemingway spent time with the Star until 1918, where he became an ambulance driver in Italy for the American Red Cross. Hemingway itched for action and to see the front lines, but tragically on a trip to the front lines Italian troops came under fire and a mortar shell wounded Hemingway. He would spend the next six months in a field hospital in Milan where he fell in love with a nurse there. Sound familiar, as that's a similar base line to A Farewell To Arms. The real life inspired elements and themes in Hemingway's work end up making The Old Man and the Sea the masterpiece it is.

The Old Man and the Sea follows Santiago, a fisherman in Cuba. Santiago is old and has long lost his edge for fishing, to the point of considered being cursed by the other fisherman. One day, Santiago tells his apprentice Manolin that he will go into the Gulf Stream to end his unlucky streak. While casting his line and bait, Santiago snares a huge marlin, and an epic battle between them erupts for two days and nights. Both exhausted, Santiago finally is able to reel in and harpoon the marlin, who he has now come to view as a similar spirited brother. Tying the marlin back to his boat, Santiago ventures back to Cuba. He is soon set upon by sharks attracted by the marlin's blood in the water, and despite his valiant efforts, the sharks eat the carcass down to its skeleton. Santiago arrives and carries his mast up the hill to his house and leaves the discarded bones on the beach and goes to sleep. The next day the fellow fisherman measure the 18 foot marlin and are in awe of Santiago's skill, telling his apprentice Manolin to apologize for them. Manolin goes to Santiago's home and finds him exhausted and battered, and cries for the old man. The two make plans once Santiago awakes to fish together, and Santiago returns to sleeping, dreaming of the glory of his youth, perhaps for the last time. 

The Old Man and the Sea is an obvious parallel to Ernest Hemingway's life at the time. Like Santiago, Hemingway had also lost his edge for his craft, being critically panned and having just written the failure of 1950s Across the River and into the Trees. Hemingway fell into a deep depression. Despite his thoughts that he could no longer write, Hemingway wrote his masterpiece, his swan song, and arguably, his suicide note. Similar to Santiago, Hemingway re-earned the respect of his colleagues by publishing The Old Man and the Sea, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in Literature the next year after its publication in 1953. Hemingway's standard bravado of handsome young men in war and strife had been replaced with what Hemingway had become, a tired old man in Cuba. The Biblical martyrdom on Santiago, such as the fishing line cutting into his hands and the carrying of his mast like the cross, was how Hemingway saw himself. 

The Old Man and the Sea was Hemingway's way of telling us that he was done, perhaps without realizing. Hemingway continued to struggle with writing after its publication and his depression worsened. Hemingway also suffered from two separate plane crashes that caused lasting harm for the rest of his life. With his poor health and worsening mental state, he was checked into a hospital where he was administered shock therapy. Once released he continued to have memory problems and lapses of anger and was readmitted for more shock therapy. Eventually admitting in a letter of his deadened senses to the world, Ernest Hemingway shot himself  in 1961. A mere nine years after The Old Man and the Sea's publication. 

The Old Man and the Sea's greatest strength lies in its truth. Hemingway was a man who could have had several books written that is just his life on the page, and he did just that. A Farewell to Arms tying parallels to World War 1, For Whom the Bell Tolls to the Spanish Civil War, and more. The prose of The Old Man and the Sea shines through and showcases a vulnerability that Hemingway had long refused to show. For all the hunting, drinking, boxing, and boisterousness that Hemingway put forward, he was only human, and due to the nature of his death, more human than most. It could be said that his vulnerability and insecurity were fronted by the features he is best known for. However The Old Man and the Sea and its truth, its admission of fatigue and the want of an end, a worthy fight, prove that those vulnerabilities were there.

In his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway writes the passage "The world breaks everyone, and those it does not break it kills, it kills the very good, and the very kind, and the very gentle impartially. If you are none of these things you can be sure that it will kill you too but there will be no particular hurry." These words applied to the broken Hemingway, who the world could not kill, body or spirit.