The Old Man and the Sea

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The Old Man and the Sea is . . . very good Hemingway. It is swiftly and smoothly told; the conflict is resolved into a struggle between a man and a force which he scarcely comprehends, but which he knows that he must continue to strive against, though knowing too that the struggle must end in defeat. The defeat is only apparent, however, for . . . it becomes increasingly clear throughout the story that it is not victory or defeat that matters but struggle itself. The absence of parents, wife and children eliminates filial, conjugal, or parental obligations. That absence alsofrees Santiago from compulsory duties to his fellow man. And that absence tells me that self-serving ingredients foul the air of his apparent altruism and show that he is "one of us," someone who wants to be thought better of than he deserves. He is our ordinary, not our strange, brother, even though we indulge ourselves in Hemingway’s fantasy of Santiago’s nobleness. VIVA MODERN CRITICAL INTERPRETATIONS presents the best current criticism on the most widely read and studied poems, novels and dramas of the Western world, from Oedipus Rex and the Iliad to such modern and contemporary works as William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Don Delillo’s White Noise. Table Of Contents Introduction Review of The Old Man and the Sea The Boy and the Lions The Heroic Impulse in The Old Man and the Sea The Old Man and the Sea and the American Dream Confiteor Hominem: Ernest Hemingway’s Religion of Man The Later Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea: Hemingway’s Tragic Vision of Man Fakery in The Old Man and the Sea Hemingway’s Extended Vision: The Old Man and the Sea The Old Man and the Sea: Vision / Revision New World, Old Myths Hemingway’s Craft in The Old Man and the Sea The Poem of Santiago and Manolin Incarnation and Redemption in The Old Man and the Sea The Later Fiction: Hemingway and the Aesthetics of Failure A Not-So-Strange Old Man: The Old Man and the Sea Contrasts in Form: Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Faulkner’s ‘The Bear’ The Cuban Context of The Old Man and the Sea Chronology Contributors