What literary devices does Hemingway use in The Old Man and the Sea?

The literary devices (elements and techniques) that Ernest Hemingway uses in the novella The Old Man and The Sea include:

A distinct protagonist

In this story the protagonist is Santiago. He is an old fisherman who is still trying to battle the elements and his own weaknesses to continue fishing and support himself.

A distinct setting

The setting of the novella for most of the action is the Gulf Stream and this is where Santiago wages his battle against the forces of nature.

Conflict

Conflict is essential to excellent drama. Conflict in The Old Man and The Sea is the battle between the giant marlin and Santiago as he tries to haul this huge catch in. Conflict is also Santiago versus the sharks; these sharks end up destroying the marlin and leave nothing really for Santiago to bring to market for money.

Conflict in the story also involves Santiago against himself – man against himself. This is when someone battles their fears, physical weaknesses, inhibitions, and more as they seek to achieve a goal. It is a matter of someone overcoming faults and/or weaknesses to achieve a goal or a certain kind of success.

Dialogue

Hemingway moves the story along at a brisk pace through the use of crisp and direct dialogue.

Simile

An example of simile in The Old Man and the Sea is in this line:

His shirt had been patched so many times that it was like the sail...

Santiago’s shirt is being compared to a sail. With so many patches it resembled the sail. Here we see two different objects compared so as to see the likeness between them.

Imagery

The reader, through imagery, can understand the characteristics of the big fish (with its distinct sword) through the use of imagery, as in this passage:

His sword was as long as a baseball bat and tapered like a rapier…

Internal monologue

This type of literary device brings the reader into the mind of a character. In this story, the reader understands more about Santiago through his internal monologues. An example is this passage as he thinks about and battles the great fish:

He is a great fish and I must convince him, he thought. I must never let him learn his strength nor what he could do if he made his run.

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What rhetorical devices does Hemingway use in The Old Man and the Sea?

Hemingway makes skillful use of allusion in order to identify the alienation of Santiago from the community of fisherman, which then translates to man's alienation. For, through certain allusions, the reader deduces that Santiago with his "eyes the color of the sea" is clearly not Cuban, but Spanish. As part of the race of the conquerors, Santiago, therefore, is an alien in the humble fishing community.

In his essay, "Spain and Otherness in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea," Jeffrey Herlihy of Morningside College contends that through several allusions, Hemingway provides the Spanish background of Santiago forged a national identity in the Canary Islands. For, in an early dialogue with Manolin Santiago responds to the boy about how he work out of the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago,“When I was your age I was before the mast on a square rigged ship that ran to Africa.”

Underscoring Santiago's alienation from the community, he dreams frequently of  

the white peaks of the Islands rising from the sea and then he dreamed of the different harbours and road-steads of the Canary Islands.

Hemingway uses what Walker Gibson, in "Tough, Sweet, & Stuffy: An Essay on Modern American Prose Styles," calls a "plain" or "tough" style.   Hemingway was notorious for "tough talk" as an ambulance driver during World War I and newspaper man thereafter.  To be sure, his journalistic style carried over into fiction. After all, Hemingway once admitted:

[I was taught] to distrust adjectives as I would learn to distrust certain people in certain situations.

William Faulkner even said, as a kind of backhanded compliment:

[Hemingway] had never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary.

In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway, himself an old man at the time, not only uses this simple, unadorned style to portray Santiago, but he also characterizes the old man the way The Gospels characterize Jesus, in a religious and ethical rhetorical appeal that highlights his suffering and adds to his lore.

Throughout the novella, Hemingway uses such rhetorical devices as: polysyndeton (lots of "and"), high frequency words, monosyllabic words, articles,  action verbs and tense, simple sentences, and short, choppy, compound sentences (see below).  

His narration is masculine (without being too macho), and heavily reliant on ethos in its rhetorical appeal and characterization of Santiago.  Ethos, as you know, means "suffering," and it is the language of most fiction.  It is obviously the language of The Gospels.

As with most of his writing, Hemingway uses an elliptical style, so what is not said is as or more important that what is said.  This is especially true when Santiago is alone on the boat catching the fish and fighting off the sharks.  He talks to himself, sure, but the reader must fill in the narrative gaps.  In addition, Hemingway uses several Spanish phrases ("bodega," "aqua mala") and fishing terms ("skiff," "bonito") as devices of regional dialect and jargon, respectively, for added realism.  

To build myth and romance, Hemingway uses many religious and cultural allusions and symbols, both ancient and modern.  He references Joe DiMaggio, Hail Marys, John McGraw, the lions of Africa, the Detroit Tigers, the Yankees.  All told, these function as a kind of allegory.  Most critics agree that the marlin is Hemingway's book and the sharks symbolize literary critics.    

Examine one of the novella's ending passages:

He unstepped the mast and furled the sail and tied it. Then he shouldered the mast and started to climb. It was then he knew the depth of his tiredness. He stopped for a moment and looked back and saw in the reflection of the street light the great tail of the fish standing up well behind the skiff’s stern. He saw the white naked line of his backbone and the dark mass of the head with the projecting bill and all the nakedness between.

He started to climb again and at the top he fell and lay for some time with the mast across his shoulder. He tried to get up. But it was too difficult and he sat there with the mast on his shoulder and looked at the road. A cat passed by on the far side going about its business and the old man watched it. Then he just watched the road.

This passage is written at a 4th to 7th grade reading level, about the readability of a newspaper.  The sentences are long, but the sentence structure and word choice are simple.  Each word has one or two syllables.  There's very little adornment, few adjectives.  The passage parallels The Gospels' account of Jesus carrying his cross to Calvary.  It's heavy on ethos in its rhetorical appeal.

What components define Hemingway's style in The Old Man and the Sea?

The Old Man and the Sea contains two major stylistic components. The first is Hemingway's classic narrative style: short, focused descriptions and run-on sentences without commas. These act to draw the reader into the narrative, keeping interest while avoiding unnecessary pauses or digressions.

He knew what a huge fish this was and he thought of him moving away in the darkness with the tuna held crosswise in his mouth. At that moment he felt him stop moving but the weight was still there.

Each sentence describes exactly what is happening without comment or explanation; the reader is invited to take the events of the story in and interpret it at a more personal level.

The second major component is Hemingway's use of internal monologue. Santiago is alone at sea, and so he talks only occasionally. Mostly, his thought processes are shown to the reader, which gives the dispassionate narration a more intimate feeling:

What I will do if he decides to go down, I don't know. What I'll do if he sounds and dies I don't know. But I'll do something. There are plenty of things I can do.

He held the line against his back and watched its slant in the water and the skiff moving steadily to the North-West.
(Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, Google Books)

Here, Santiago's internal thoughts are juxtaposed with the narration. He thinks about his options as the skiff is pulled, and resolves to take some form of action rather than being passive. The use of internal monologue allows a greater insight into Santiago, and also helps to establish his past life without having him laboriously explain it to another person.