Criticism > Short Story Criticism > The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway - Carlos Baker (essay date 1962)

The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway - Carlos Baker (essay date 1962)

Carlos Baker (essay date 1962)

SOURCE: "Hemingway's Ancient Mariner," in Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels, edited by Carlos Baker, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962, pp. 156-72.

[In the following revision of an essay that first appeared in his influential 1956 work Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, Baker argues that Hemingway's particular understanding of the notion of "Wahrheit," or "Truth, "finds its greatest expression in The Old Man and the Sea; that Santiago is a Christ-like hero in touch with his true nature; and that the boy Manolin stands for the old man's lost youth. He goes on to comment on the movement of struggle, deprivation, and triumph in the novella.]

I. TRUTH AND POETRY

Goethe called his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit, Poetry and Truth. The reverse of Goethe's title, as a strategy of emphasis, admirably fits the collected works of Hemingway. From the first he has...

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