The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway - Sam S. Baskett (essay date 1975)
Sam S. Baskett (essay date 1975)
SOURCE: "Toward a 'Fifth Dimension' in The Old Man and the Sea," in The Centennial Review, Vol. XIX, No. 4, Fall, 1975, pp. 269-86.
[In the following essay, Baskett provides a detailed analysis of the symbolic detail in The Old Man and the Sea—from biblical allusions to Santiago's aura of "strangeness" — which he says contributes to Hemingway's "fifth dimensional prose," or writing that "communicates the immediate experience of the perpetual now."]
Although the protagonist of The Old Man and the Sea vows "to make a pilgrimage to the Virgen de Cobre if I catch [this fish],"1 it is unlikely, since "In the night I spat something strange and felt something in my chest was broken" (p. 138), that he will live to keep his promise.2 In a sense, however, Hemingway kept it for him, donating his Nobel Medal to the Shrine of our Lady of Charity of Cobre,...
[The entire page is 8748 words long]
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