Hemingway’s Language Style and Writing Techniques
in The Old Man and the Sea
Yaochen Xie
Luohe Medical College
148 Da Xue Lu Street, Luohe
Henan 462002, China
E-mail: xieyaochen1963@yahoo.com.cn
Abstract
Among
many great American writers, Hemingway is famous for his objective and terse
prose style. As all the novels Hemingway published in his life, The Old Man and the Sea typically reflects his unique writing style. The language is simple
and natural on the surface, but actually deliberate and artificial. Hemingway’s
style is related to his experience as a journalist. The influence of his
style is great all over the world. The
Old Man and the Sea is full of facts, most of which
comes from Hemingway own experience. In the forepart of the novel, they are used to
show the quality of Santiago’s life, and are narrated simply and naturally;
while in the latter part of the novel, they are used from inside Santiago’s
own consciousness and form part of a whole scheme of the novel.
Keywords: Facts, Simplicity, Iceberg Theory
1. Introduction
The Old Man and the Sea is undoubtedly Hemingway’s masterpiece. It is a simple story
about a fisherman Santiago and his battle with a great marlin. For 84
days Santiago does not catch a single fish but he does not feel discouraged. He goes far
out into the sea and hooks a giant marlin. A desperate struggle ensues in which
Santiago manages to kill the fish and tie it to his bout, only to
find that on the way home he has to fight a more desperate struggle with some dangerous
giant sharks, which eat up the marlin, leaving only a skeleton. The old man
brings it home and goes to bed to dream, almost dead with exhaustion. But
his struggle wins him much respect. Among many great American writers, Hemingway’
is famous for his objective and terse prose style. As the last novel Hemingway
published in his life, The Old Man and the Sea typically reflects his unique writing style. This paper aims
to discuss the writing style and techniques in The Old Man and the Sea and focuses especially on the language style and one of the important techniques—the
way to use facts in his novel.
2. Language Style
2.1 Analyses of the Language
Style
Among
all Hemingway’s works, The Old
Man and the Sea is the most typical one to his unique
language style. Its language is simple and natural, and has the effect of
directness, clarity and freshness. This is because Hemingway always
manages to choose words concrete, specific, more commonly found, more
Anglo-Saxon, casual and conversational. He seldom uses adjectives and abstract
nouns, and avoids complicated syntax. Hemingway’s strength lies in
his short sentences and very specific details. His short sentences are
powerfully loaded with the tension, which he sees in life. Where he does not use a
simple and short sentence, he connects the various parts of the sentence in a straightforward
and sequential way, often linked by “and”. In his task of creating real people,
Hemingway uses dialogue as an effective device. 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. 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.”
The
dialogue, too, is combined with the realistic and 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. The speakers are distanced from readers to a
certain degree. And while their language taking on a king of epic dignity;
it does not lose its convincingness. Even slightly strange exchanges like the
following become fairly acceptable.
For example:
“You’re my alarm clock.” the boy said.
“Age
is my alarm clock,” the old man said. “Why does 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.”
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 1/8 of it being above water. 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 picture of compression, from which, the1/8of iceberg above water,
they can learn the implied meaning and feelings of the author,
7/8of 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.” So this novel has a great 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 contest in life. They compensate and enrich the
inner meaning of the main plot of fishing. So the simplicity of the novel is
highly suggestive. So Hemingway has formed narrative and dialogue,
which though natural and simple on the surface, is actually
deliberated and artificial. It combines elements that are realistic with
elements that are stylized and heightened.
2.2 The Forming of the Language
Style
How
Hemingway has formed such a writing style? The reason is related to his own
experiences. “His use of short sentences and paragraphs and vigorous
and positive language, and the deliberate avoidance of gorgeous adjectives are some of
the traces of his early journalistic practices.” After leaving school, he went
to the Kansas City Star, which was one of the best newspapers in America
at that time. He served as its eager and energetic reporter. As a journalist, Hemingway
trained himself in the economy of expression. He once said that, during his
working in Star, he had to learn to use simple sentences, which is very
useful to him; and that the experience of working as a journalist would not do harm to a
young writer, instead it is very helpful if he could cast it off timely. He
laid stress on “speaking” with facts and objected groundless concoction in
writing. His descriptions of details are full of factuality, and are as precise
as news reports.
2.3 The Influence of the
Language Style
The
influence of Hemingway’s language style is great. In the latter part of his
life, Hemingway was known as “Papa Hemingway”. It refers mainly to his
contribution to the development of a new writing style in America—the
colloquial style. A critic named Storm Jameson discussing “The Craft of
the Novelist” in the January 1934 issue of The English Review,
she advanced an explanation of Hemingway’s popularity: It is this simplicity,
this appeal to out crudest interested, which explains Hemingway’s
success…In English at least his success has been largely with the intellectuals. They have
praised his simplicity, his directness…And Hemingway’s influence as a stylist
was “neatly expressed in the praise of the Noble Prize Committee
about ‘his powerful style—forming mastery of the art’ of writing modern
fiction.”
3. The Writing Techniques—the Way
to Use Facts
3.1 The Facts Are Selected
Apart
from the language style, which The
Old Man and the Sea is famous for, the writing techniques
in this novel are also worth paying close attention to. A very important one
is the way to use facts. The main events of the story seem to be based
on a real incident, which is described by Hemingway in an article about fishing
in the Gulf Stream in Esquire for April 1936. So the novel is full of
facts, such as the habit of fish, the technique of the novel lies in the way to
use these facts.
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.” Like any realist, he relies on selection. When the
giant marlin finally surfaces, his tail “was higher than a big scythe
blade and very pale lavender above the dark blue water.” Sargasso weed is
bleached and yellow by day; Tuna are silver when they jump out of the
water, but blue-backed and fold-sides when swimming. Hemingway
never describes them excessively, but chooses 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.
3.2 The Facts Are Used as a
Device to Make the Fictional World Accepted
Secondly,
the facts are used as a device to make the fictional word accepted. The novel
is not simple 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 practical knowledge. This shows “the facts
are fundamentally a device, a technique of reassuring our sense of
everyday values.” 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.”
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 world. And this is what underlies Hemingway’s famous statement
that his intention was always to convey to the reader “the way it was.”
4. Conclusion
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.” It is unique. Now “Hemingway
style” is widely used to refer to the kind of prose writing which is
characterized by simplicity, directness, clarity, freshness and naturalness.
References
Chang,
Yaoxin. (1987). Chapter 14 in A Survey of
American Literature. Tianjin: Nankai University Press.
Chang,
yaoxin. (2003). A Survey of American Literature. Nankai University Press.
Ernest
Hemingway. (1998). The Old Man and the Sea. Beijing: World Publishing Corporation.
Hu,
quansheng. (1998). 20century English and American
Selected Readings-Modernism volume. Shanghai Jiaotong
University
Press.
Kenneth Graham. (1991). commentary
in York Notes: The Old Man and the Sea.
Beijing: World Publishing Corporation.
