The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway - Clinton S. Burhans, Jr. (essay date 1960)
Clinton S. Burhans, Jr. (essay date 1960)
SOURCE: "The Old Man and the Sea: Hemingway's Tragic Vision of Man," in American Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4, January, 1960, pp. 446-55.
[In the following essay, Burhans asserts that in his novella Hemingway uses "perfectly realized symbolism and irony" to affirm the values of courage, love, humility, solidarity, and interdependence.]
I
In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway uses an effective metaphor to describe the kind of prose he is trying to write: he explains that "if 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."1
Among all the works of Hemingway which illustrate this metaphor,...
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