The Old Man and the Sea is one of the great works of 20th-century English fiction, but it’s also relatively easy to read. It’s short, for a start, at less than fifty pages. Written in 1951 while Hemingway was living in Cuba, it was his last work and probably his most famous, winning him a Pulitzer prize. Soon after writing it he also received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
SIMPLE PLOT
The plot of the novel seems straightforward: Santiago is eighty-five years old, and lives in poverty in a little shack by the sea in Havana, trying, and usually failing, to earn a living as a fisherman. One day, Santiago sails6 far out to sea and there encounters an enormous marlin. Catching the fish and selling it at market would bring Santiago much-needed income, but the attempt would be dangerous as he is an old man alone in shark-infested waters. The simplicity of the story is deceptive, as the themes and symbolism behind it are complex.
THE theory of omission
The prose of the novel is minimalist, with short sentences and concise descriptions. Hemingway used the metaphor of an iceberg to describe what he was trying to achieve in his writing. He points out that in the same way that only one-eighth of an iceberg is visible above the surface of the water, so, a good writer will keep some things hidden. Hemingway believed that the reader should be able to imagine a lot of things that the writer doesn’t explain just from a few details that appear on the page. This writing technique, so characteristic of Hemingway’s work, is sometimes known as the Theory of Omission.
What’s left unsaid
For much of the story, the old man Santiago is alone in his boat with nobody to talk to except himself and the sea creatures. When he’s on land, though, he does speak to his young friend Manolín. The dialogue between them seems superficial, but again, we need to keep the iceberg metaphor in mind, and look for what’s hidden beneath the surface. Here’s one example from near the beginning of the story:
“What do you have to eat?” the boy asked.
“A pot of yellow rice with fish. Do you want some?”
“No. I will eat at home. Do you want me to make the fire?”
“No. I will make it later on. Or I may eat the rice cold.”
Behind the words the reader senses a much more complex situation because in the next line we learn that Santiago and Manolín went through this fiction every day: “There was no pot of yellow rice and fish, and the boy knew this, too.”
So, through a very short dialogue, Hemingway has given us enough clues to realise that Santiago is so poor that he often lacks food, that he is too proud to admit this to Manolín and that Manolín says nothing in order to save the old man’s dignity. It’s a classic example of the theory of omission in action.
vocabulary
There is, however, some vocabulary that may be challenging to learners of English. Some of these words are terms connected with boats and fishing, like, for example, ‘skiff’ or ‘gaff’. Be reassured though, some native speakers may be a bit unsure of these words too! And, of course, you don’t need to understand every word in order to follow the story.