‘You’re my alarm clock’, the boy said.
‘Age is my alarm clock’, the old man said. ‘Why do old man wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?’
‘I don’t know’, the boy said. ‘All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard’.
‘I can remember it’, the old man said. ‘ I’ll waken you in time.’8
The simple sentences and the repeated rhythms hit at the profundities that the surface of the language tries to ignore. Its simplicity is highly suggestive and connotative, and often reflects the strong undercurrent of emotion. Indeed, the more closely the reader watches, the less rough and simple the characters appear. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway uses an effective metaphor to describe his writing style:
If a writer of the prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.9
Among all the works of Hemingway, the saga of Santiago is thought as the most typical one to this Iceberg Theory. The author seldom expresses his own feelings directly, nor does he make any comments or explanations. On the contrary, he tries to narrate and describe things objectively and blend his own feelings harmoniously to the natural narration and description this gives readers a pictures compression, from which-the 1/8 of the iceberg above water, they can learn the implying meaning and feelings of the author- 7/8 of the iceberg under water. When Hemingway said of this story, “I tried to make a real old man, a real sea and real sharks”, he then went on to say, “But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things.”10 So this novel has a great and significance conveyed by a compressed action. The core of the novel’s action is fishing. To the hero, fishing is not simply of contest in life. It contains profound philosophic meaning. In addition, two details-the baseball match and the hand wresting with the Negro, like fishing, symbolize the contention in life. They compensate and enrich the inner meaning of the main plot of fishing. So the simplicity of the novel is highly suggestive.
Occasionally, the author uses such figures of speech as metaphor, personification, etc to describe details. Hemingway likes to us natural things to make metaphors. For example, he describes Santiago’s eyes as “the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.”11The metaphor reveals that the old man is closely linked with nature. At the beginning of the novel, a simile is used: “the sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.”12 Here Santiago’s eyes are contrasted with the patched sail, which symbolize defeat, as reveals Santiago’s unyielding character.
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