In his task of creating real people, Hemingway uses dialogue as an effective device. It is presented in a form “as close to the dramatic as possible, with a minimum of explanatory comment.”3 Here is an example chosen from The Old Man and the Sea:
‘What do you have to eat?’ the boy asked.
‘No, I will eat at home. Do you want me to make the fire?’
‘No, I will make it later on. Or I may eat the rice cold.’
Here we can see that such interpolations as “he said” have frequently been omitted and the words are very colloquial. Thus the speech comes to the reader as if he were listening. Hemingway has captured the immediacy of dialogue skillfully and has made the economical speech connotative.
But it is good to note that Hemingway’s style is deliberate and artificial, and is never as natural as it seems to be. The reasons are as follows. Firstly, in some specific moments, in order to stand out by contrast and to describe an important turning point or climax, the style is made a little different:
He took all his pain and what was left of his long gone pride and he put it against the fish’s agony and the fish came over on to his side and swam gently on his side, his bill almost touching the planking of the skiff, and started to pass the boat, long, deep, wide, silver and barred with purple and interminable in the water.5
The language in this one-sentence paragraph is different from other parts of the novel. Kenneth Graham has commented that the sentence builds up its parts in a carefully laborious sequence-“all his pain and what was left of his strength and his long gone pride”. It emulates the movement of the exhausted marlin and the physical strain of the old man. And it mounts to a heavy crescendo in the very un-prosaic inversion of adjectives-“long, deep, wide”-ending in the virtually poetic cadence, “interminable in the water.”6
The dialogue, too, is combined with the realistic and the artificial. Usually the content contains and the expression contains the artificial. In The Old Man and the Sea, the language style is very peculiar from Hemingway’s other writings. This is because the novel is an English version of the Spanish that Santiago and Mandolin would speak in real life. “Since we are meant to realize that Santiago and Mandolin could not possibly speak like this, since English is not his tongue anyway, we are more likely to accept other artificialities of the dialogue. Using the device of a pretended ‘translation’, which would be bound to stilt in any case, Hemingway can ‘poetize’ the dialogue as he wishes.”7 The speakers are distanced from readers to a certain degree. And while their language taking on a kind of epic dignity, it does not lose its convincingness. Even slightly strange exchanges like the following become fairly acceptable. For example:
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