The Old Man and the Iceberg

 I promised myself that I would try to read more stuff this year that was challenging and actually made me think. I also have to balance that with time management so I’m gravitating to shorter works. Which is why I reread Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea.

Yup, another book that is a staple for high school book reports.

Is it possible to spoil The Old Man and The Sea? Well, just in case:

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers 

The book is about an old fisherman’s last great struggle bringing in a giant marlin, only to have sharks eat it before he can bring it back to shore. It’s one of the classic examples of Man versus Environment, unless you choose to interpret it as Man versus Himself.

As I read it, I couldn’t decide the book was holding up Santiago for his struggles against adversity and loss or if it was condemning those choices that led to him probably dying as the book ends. Which pretty much sums up Hemingway pretty well.

Reading about the book after I read it, I found that Hemingway himself had coined the Iceberg Theory of writing. That almost everything, particularly the things that the author knows, should be hidden, left out. The meaning of a work should be left for the reader to figure out.

Which is why Hemingway Scholarship is its own industry. When everything is up for interpretation, every interpretation can be pursued.

That said, I don’t belong to the school of thought that Hemingway was a lazy author or a bad author. Relentlessly shaving a work down to a theoretical minimum and still have it be engaging is an impressive feat. And frankly, it’s not as minimalist as people who don’t read Hemingway say it is. The Old Man and The Sea may be about an old guy, a boat and a fish and not much else but Santiago has a rich inner dialogue.

Reading about the publication of the book, I read that The Old Man and The Sea was the last major work that Hemmingway published before his death. It’s also apparently the book that revived and sealed his literary reputation. And, boy, it’s tempting to read the book as a metaphor for that point in his career. Which is definitely an option but the open nature of the work makes that only one of many interpretations.

Which just goes back to the Iceberg Theory. The more I look at the book, the more I come back to the idea that there cannot be any one right answer. Rereading The Old Man and The Sea made me think more about Hemmingway than the book.

Post Script: 

While reading about Hemmingway, I found out he really was a champion fisherman. And that he kept a tommy gun on his boat to shoot any sharks that got near his catches. That might actually be an idea that is viable but damn.