Criticism > Short Story Criticism > The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway - G. R. Wilson, Jr. (essay date 1977)
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway - G. R. Wilson, Jr. (essay date 1977)
G. R. Wilson, Jr. (essay date 1977)
SOURCE: "Incarnation and Redemption in The Old Man and the Sea," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 14, No. 4, Fall, 1977, pp. 369-73.
[In the following essay, Wilson asserts that the time spans mentioned in The Old Man and the Sea refer to the sacred Christian mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption, which reinforce the mythic dimension of the story.]
That the heroic fisherman of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea carries a heavy burden of Christ symbolism has been widely recognized, but critics have disagreed markedly about the extent to which this identification functions in the novella and about how this symbolism is finally to be interpreted. In addition to the well annotated references to the crucifixion itself and to the other events of Passion Week, the author has, however, provided some helpful clues quite early in the bookâclues that previous commentators seem...
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Criticism
- Mark Schorer (essay date 1952)
- Clinton S. Burhans, Jr. (essay date 1960)
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- Joseph M. Flora (essay date 1973)
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- James Barbour and Robert Sattelmeyer (essay date 1975)
- G. R. Wilson, Jr. (essay date 1977)
- Charles Taylor (essay date 1981-82)
- Wolfgang Wittkowski (essay date 1983)
- Ben Stoltzfus (essay date 1991)
- Bickford Sylvester (essay date 1996)
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