Firstly the facts are selected. “Hemingway’s old man, boy, sea, fish, and sharks are not so much built up in our minds, detail by detail, facts by facts, as drive into our mind by the force and the sympathy with which the author himself shares in their imaginary existence.”18 Like any realist, he relies on selection. When the giant marlin finally surfaces, his tail “was higher than a big scythe blade and a very pale lavender above the dark blue water.”19 Sargasso weed is bleached and yellow by day; Tuna are silver when they jump out if the water, but blue-backed and gold-sides when swimming. Hemingway never described them with excessively, but choose some effective ones. He uses them with a sense of how colors shift and change in their relationship. Without selection, there can be no intensity, and compression.
Secondly, the facts are used as a device to make the fictional word accepted. The novel is not simply a manual for us to study the technique to catch a fish or how to survive in a boat. The author tries to implicate people’s imagination in what is happening by appealing to our love of practical knowledge. This shows “the facts are fundamentally a device, a technique of reassuring our sense of everyday values.”20 So they can help to make us accept more readily what the author has invented and made more dramatic than in everyday life. Still take the use of color as example:
The clouds over the land now rose like mountains and the coast was only a long green line with the gray-blue hills behind it. The water was a dark blue now, so dark that it was almost purple. As he looked down into it he saw the red sifting of the plankton in the dark water and the strange light the sun made now.21
These facts show readers the process of fishing, which mostly comes from the author’s own experience. From these facts, which are vivid, precise and terse, readers can learn a lot about how to catch a fish and can also feel as if they themselves were catching a fish. Then they will have the sense that what the author describes is real and believable. Therefore, as Kenneth Graham has said, many facts in the novel about fishing and about the sea have a double function: they satisfy people’s sense of the real word. And this is what underlies Hemingway’s famous statement that his intention was always to convey to the reader “the way it was.”22
All in all, Hemingway’s language in The Old Man and the Sea is simple and natural on the surface, but actually deliberate and artificial. “The language is rarely emotional. Rather, it controls emotions: it holds them in.”23 The forming of this distinct style is related to Hemingway’s own experience. And the influence of this style is not only within America but also all over the world. The facts in the novel are selected and used as a device to make the fictional world accepted. Unlike other novelists who add allegorical meanings to their facts, Hemingway uses the facts simply and naturally, without any emotion. In the latter part of the novel, instead of being narrated by the author, the facts are used from inside Santiago’s own consciousness, and form part of a whole scheme of the novel. Besides what have been mentioned above, other techniques in The Old Man and the Sea, such as realism, monologue, the creation of suspense and so on, are also very successful. All these show Hemingway’s superb artistic attainments as a Nobel Prize winner.
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