In addition to hunting expeditions in Africa and Wyoming, Hemingway developed a passion for deep-sea fishing in the waters off Key West, the Bahamas, and Cuba. He also armed his fishing boat, the Pilar, and monitored with his crew Nazi activities and their submarines in that area during World War II. In 1940 Hemingway bought Finca Vigia, a house outside Havana, Cuba. Its surroundings were a paradise for his last years. Hemingway's drinking had started already when he was a reporter, and could tolerate large amounts of alcohol. For a long time, drinking did not affect the quality of his writing. In the late 1940s he started to hear voices in his head, he was overweight, the blood pressure was high, and he had clear signs of cirrhosis of the liver.
Across the River and Into the Trees, Hemingway's first novel in a decade, was poorly received, but the allegorical 27,000 word story The Old Man and the Sea, published first in Life magazine in 1952, restored again his fame. Much of his time Hemingway spent in Cuba until Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution. He supported Castro but when the living became too difficult, he moved to the United States. While visiting Africa in 1954, Hemingway was injured in two flying accidents and was taken to a hospital. In the same year he started to write True at First Light, which was his last full-length book. Part of it appeared in Sports Illustrated in 1972 under the title African Journal.
In Hemingway’s life time, he experience two world wars. And he serves in army, then work as a reporter. All of his experiments have a great impact on his literature creation. The soldier life has tell him never give up, which incarnated vividly in his literature. As a journalist, the expression should be simple and this is the direct origin of Iceberg Theory.
1. 2 The introduction of Iceberg Theory
Hemingway is famous for his language. With much care and effort, he created a very influential and immediately recognizable style. And the Iceberg Theory is one of the most famous. Hemingway was too good famous for his iceberg technique. He thinks that a good writer dose not need to make every detail of a story clearly; the one-eight that presented will tell all other implicit meaning of the story. The characteristic of Iceberg is that people just see one-eight of it floating on the sea, however, the greatest parts of it is the other seven-eights which is under the sea. Hemingway believes that the simplicity of means can create the greatest effect. This write style is used to tell readers the meaning of a story with simple depiction, and make people understand the hidden meaning by themselves. So the simplicity is the basic element of iceberg theory. And this characteristic relates to symbolism. This relationship is very important for the Iceberg Theory. Because simplicity is just a characteristic of language, it needs to be embodied by symbolism. This style he created in his early work, such as In Our Time and The Sun also Rises, was almost too good. But in The Old Man and the Sea, the Iceberg theory got the most achievement. He seldom uses adjectives and abstract nouns, and avoids complicated syntax in this fiction. All of these make The old Man and the Sea of his most successful works.
2 Embodiment of Iceberg Theory in The Old Man and the Sea
As we all know, the Iceberg Theory is on the base of simplicity and symbolism. In this part, the embodiment of these two features in The Old Man and the Sea will be discussed respectively.
2. 1 Simplicity, the style of language
As one of the important elements of iceberg theory, simplicity is more substantial than any others. In this part, the author will give the introduction of simplicity and discuss the embodiment of it in The Old Man and the Sea. As we all know, after the war Hemingway worked for a short time as a journalist in Chicago. Although he works as a journalist for just a short time, this is the beginning of his writing vocation. So this work has a great impact on his literary creation. The requirement of news writing is as simple as possible. As a journalist, one should delete all excrescent words and sentences which include almost adjectives and adverbs. In addition to those words, some lyric sentences and discussional sentence need to be deleted too. All of those are the qualifications of news writing. Hemingway hardly reveals the details which carry on the development of story, nor does he directly depicts the people and events, and even ignores the characters, motivation and mental state of characters.
In The Old Man and the Sea, the author narrates dramatic personae for three days and three nights in the sea emphatically. And during this time, Hemingway puts all the society away. As himself once said: “this story could be a giant masterpiece with thousands of pages, it’s characters could be include all the people who live in this fishing village.” [8]
But actually he did not do that. On the contrary, he just chooses several characters and deletes most of contests. According to Iceberg Theory, all the qualifiers in a work should be deleted, and the reminded part is the top of iceberg, that is the soul of a story. For example, no body knows where the old man (Santiago) is from, what his background is. In fact, Santiago is a person who has no link with the social reality at all. As a fishing man, in this story, he did not have any relationship with fish trader or fish process factory. The old man, the sea and the boy are the three elements of this story. So the theme of the novel is concise. 转贴于 酷文网-论文下载中心 http://www.coolwen.net
共6页: 上一页 [1] [2] 3 [4] [5] [6] 下一页
网摘收藏:
当前位置:
载入中...
-> 在百度中搜索：
-> 在Google中搜索：