Dec 22, 2009

The Old Man and the Sea | Techniques

The Old Man and the Sea employs straightforward prose and conventional narrative form and technique. Technically speaking, it is perhaps Hemingway's most conventional fiction. None of the modernist techniques — indirection, implication, allusion, omission, unexplained juxtaposition — that Hemingway so elaborately deploys in In Our Time (1925; see separate entry) and other works are used in this parable-like tale, which helps to explain why it reaches the widest audience of any Hemingway work.

Consider, for example, his use of symbolism to suggest that Santiago is...