On the Necessity of Suspending Disbelief: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

(shamelessly showing off my LEGO flower collection)

On the Necessity of Suspending Disbelief: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Everyone and their brother and their brother’s dog's BFF seems to have read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea in, like, middle school—everyone but me (and, it turns out, my husband). As I am currently writing a story about a fisherman, a piece I suspect will be novella-length, I realized early my tale’s parallels to both The Old Man and the Sea and Moby Dick. When I looked up some basic information about The Old Man and the Sea, I learned it is less than 30K words, or about 80-some printed pages (which, of course, means it is ideal for middle-school reading programs) and realized it is also, in fact, a true comp to my own piece. I read this book in two brief sittings—which could have been one sitting if not for my social-media-fractured attention-span. Apparently, Hemingway had originally intended this ostensibly over-long short story to be included in a collection of short stories, but then after sharing it with a number of people, he decided to publish it as a standalone novella, and then the entire thing was picked up for publication as a single issue in Life Magazine on 1 September 1952! In his introduction to the novella, Hemingway’s grandson, Seán, writes that Hemingway was excited by the prospect that those who could not afford to buy a book would have access to the story via Life Magazine.  

So, my dear writer friends, whatever compunctions you have about length, the loosey goosey definition of a novella can contain them, and further, if you’re an author the quality of Hemingway (as noted also with Stephen King in my 11/22/63 review), you can kinda get away with anything.

This review will cover The Old Man and the Sea’s sentence structures and PoV, employment of interior thoughts and dialogue, illustration of ecosystem and fishing, considerations of symbolism and ethics, and finally the necessity of suspending disbelief.

Let’s start with the craft features to get them all out of the way. For sure, Hemingway’s short-robust sentences and concrete images are polar in comparison to Fitzgerald’s long, winding sentences and florid imagery. But even more so, reading Hemingway is an entirely different act from reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Where Middlemarch contains sentences sometimes half a page long with terms often esoteric enough to be considered colloquial jargon, Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, is written with such simplicity it can be read without frustration by a middle-school student about the age of 12 (or far younger, if precocious).

One writing feature throughout the novella that contributes to this simplicity is Hemingway’s omission of the comma before a coordinating conjunction linking two independent clauses. Let me give an example to illustrate. Here is the first sentence of the novella:

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skill in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish” (1).

This quote incorporates two independent clauses (each with a clear subject and predicate) which could stand alone as complete sentences—I have underlined them to make them easy to spot. Per today’s grammar rules, it is most correct to add a comma before the coordinating conjunction, “and,” to indicate the linkage of these two independent clauses, like this:

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skill in the Gulf Stream, and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish” (1).

Again, I have underlined the change to make it easier to spot. Hemingway breaks this comma use rule consistently throughout his novella. The result? Fewer commas, and therefore, perhaps, a smoother read. Simplicity. I read somewhere recently that literature doesn’t have to be daunting and can often be both fun and easy. Hemingway’s novella bears this theory out; although, despite the language’s simplicity, it is important to note that Hemingway’s language is still varied in structure, whereby some are compound/complex sentences and others are simple enough to serve as punctuation.

For this story, Hemingway chose the third person close point-of-view in past tense. The tale mind-hops from the old man to the boy only when the old man is sleeping. Via this close perspective, the reader accesses the old man’s intimate knowledge of the sea off the east coast of Cuba with its vast wildlife activity and ever-changing ecosystem. Because of this decision, the only time the reader encounters the first-person pronoun “I” is during dialogue and thoughts—which is also worthy of note. While on the boat alone for multiple days, the old man has a lot of time to think to himself. Hemingway handles this not with quotation marks or italics, but simply by switching to the first-person point-of-view and adding “he thought” to the beginning or end of the thought, for example: “I must get him alongside this time, he thought” (58). This is an interesting (perhaps unusual?) craft choice for sharing the old man’s interior thoughts while not truly having access to them via the third-person.

Another interesting craft choice Hemingway makes here is to incorporate dialogue where otherwise it might not exist. We’ve got an old man being hauled further and further out to sea over the course of three days, and so the reader might not expect any dialogue—except that the old man realizes that without the boy in the boat, he has begun to talk to himself. Not only does the old man’s dialogue with himself, with the marlin, with the sharks, with God, provide the reader with a sense of what things sound like; it also indicates the depth of old man’s loneliness (he repeats that he wishes the boy were with him) and his cognitive acuity which degrades over time from weariness and exhaustion. At points, dialogue serves as both a commander: “Be calm and strong, old man,” (57); “Get to work, old man” (61). It also illustrates the old man’s awareness of his failing strength:

            Now you are getting confused in the head, he thought. You must keep your head clear. Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man. Or a fish, he thought.

            “Clear up, head,” he said in a voice he could hardly hear. “Clear up.” (59)

Hemingway’s use of dialogue here brings to mind this “writing taboos” seminar from my MFA program where we were taught how to work through taboos to make them work for us as writers. One of those taboos was writing phone calls. The logic behind this taboo was that people aren’t doing anything active while on the phone, so it doesn’t make for good writing. Besides, the reader can’t hear both sides of the conversation at once. Yet many authors have written phone calls well. Hemingway was presented with a situation where there would be zero dialogue, and how could he retain the social, auditory, and interiority aspects of the story without any dialogue? By inserting dialogue anyway. It works well.

Perhaps what struck me most vividly about this story was its illustration of the complex ecosystem off the east coast of Cuba. This is something Seán Hemingway mentions in his introduction to the story. Quite obviously, Hemingway spent many years fishing marlin (and shark, tuna, dolphin fish) off Cuba’s coast, learning the diversity of this setting to share it with his reader. While many might look at the ocean and become bored by its seemingly unchanging surface, Hemingway teaches us otherwise: the sea is characterized by a staggering diversity of life, currents, and tempers of weather—and the old man respects this complexity. We learn of his affinity for certain turtles, his compassion for the lives of the fish he catches and eats, and even the distinction between the beauty and habits of different species of shark. For my own part, Hemingway’s reverence and representation of nature’s details is directly applicable to my own novella. Hemingway’s attention to detail illustrated to me that to be true to my own setting’s ecosystem, I should add more. And I will.

It feels important to add here that there is much to be learned about the art of fishing from this novella, too, which might also be applied both in my life (as someone living on a lake) and my own novella (which is about a lake fisherman).

A large part of the beauty of this novella is its simplicity and unpretentiousness. The story is told in (mostly) a straight line with only brief, relevant fragments of flashback. It follows the basic plot arc, starting at the beginning, reaching a climax ¾ of the way through, and then concluding with a true denouement—instead of just stopping. Further, according to his grandson Seán, Hemingway apparently wrote of his novella, “Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is the old man. The boy is the boy and the fish is the fish. The sharks are all sharks, no better and no worse” (XVII-XVIII). The story is straightforward. Simple. And whatever symbolism does exist there may be incidental—if no less important.

However, of course, there is one old man’s profound exploration of the ethics of commercial fishing:

            It is silly not to hope, he thought. Besides I believe it is a sin. Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.

            I have no understanding of it and I am not sure that I believe in it. Perhaps it was a sin to kill the fish. I suppose it was even though I did it to keep me alive and feed many people. But then everything is a sin. Do not think about sin. It is much too late for that and there are people who are paid to do it. Let them think about it. You were born to be a fisherman as the fish was born to be a fish. San Pedro was a fisherman as was the father of the great DiMaggio.

            But he liked to think about all things that he was involved and since there was nothing to read and he did not have a radio, he thought much and he kept on thinking about sin. You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?

            “You think too much, old man,” he said aloud.

            But you enjoyed killing the dentuso, he thought. (68)

This goes on for a few more paragraphs, this pontification on the ethics of killing. It makes the reader extrapolate to consider the ethics of other sorts of killing, like hunting, exterminating rodents, using insecticide. Hemingway, a big-game hunter and fisherman himself, is not here projecting his personal morality; rather, he is asking the readers to consider for themselves. There is no preaching, which makes the question even more poignant.

Finally, one craft feature absolutely necessary for the success of this story is the author’s plea for the reader to suspend disbelief. I’d never previously read The Old Man and the Sea but had heard many others talk about it. I knew there was an old man alone on a small boat, that he’d catch a giant marlin, and that it would be eaten by sharks before the old man could make it back to port. What I did not know was whether the man would have any evidence of the marlin once he arrived home, and thus whether anyone would have any reason to believe his tall tale.

***SPOILER ALERT***

Those who have read the story know that the entire skeleton of the marlin makes it to port intact, lashed to the side of the skiff—the marlin’s beautiful tail is the last thing mentioned in the story. I mean, thank God, amirite? But this is where the willing suspension of disbelief enters Hemingway’s novella: if mako and bonnethead sharks violently consumed the marlin over the course of a day and night, how is it possible they did not accidentally rip any of the lashings or break apart the marlin’s spine/skeleton? How is it possible for the lashings, once tight against the marlin’s meaty body, to remain tightly-enough lashed once the marlin was deprived of all its meat to make it all the way back to port without falling away? Hemingway deals with these uncertainties skillfully through the old man’s descent into delirium. Because he reaches port at night, because his sight is splotchy, and because he is collapsing from exhaustion, the old man never stops to inspect the remains or consider his luck that there is any skeleton left at all. Hemingway creates through the old man’s delirium a narrative separation sufficient to retain some mystery about the conclusion, asking the reader to accept it as-is without further explanation. Deftly handled, Hemingway. Pretty neato, if you ask me.

Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is perhaps the perfect example of a piece of literature that is fun, quick, and easy to read. If anyone out there, like me, is suffering from social-media-induced-short-attention-span, The Old Man and the Sea is a great place to begin retraining your brain.