The Old Man and the Sea

Hello avid followers of Whiskey Before Breakfast and other book lovers. It's so great to see you all back here again. I hope the holidays brought you all joy, laughter, and an excessive amount of eggnog and Christmas songs. Upon returning home from a draining semester at school I proceeded to pound my life back into something more recognizable and immediately devoured as many books as I could get my hands on. One of these was Ernest Hemingway's Pulitzer Prize winning novella, The Old Man and the Sea.

Because I was feeling somewhat pretentious (and lacking in my classics genre compared to Spence), I decided to begin a six hour endeavor on this work. In the end, I can truly say, I was very much rewarded. Let me be forthright, this is and was the first Hemingway book I had ever read. So, much like a babe in the woods, I had no idea what I was getting myself in to.

The Old Man and the Sea is a methodical and very much existential work that involves a strong-willed fisherman and an equally stubborn marlin. The two battle each other over the course of three days, testing both the endurance and will of the other. That's it. If one is looking for a book that includes pages upon pages of action, fighting, and suspense, then they will be sorely disappointed. Heck, if one is even looking for a book that includes chapters then I would suggest they keep moving. This work spends much of its time exploring the thoughts and actions of a fisherman and flows from beginning to end much like the sea itself.

Hemingway wastes no time in piercing the heart of the matter in his work. Throughout the novella, the fisherman refers to the marlin as his "brother" and elicits a profound and emotional connection with the fish. He even questions the fact of whether he should be killing such a nobel creature since the two are so intertwined in their professions. That's another thing Hemingway extracts from his story: the concept of destiny. The fisherman accepts his art and profession as something he was born to do and decides that the marlin had no choice in the matter either.

It often reminded me of the scene in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, where Chigurh, the villain, demands that a gas station owner call a coin flip. He states that the coin had been traveling all these years in order to reach this one point and that the owner must call it. He has no other reason than that of destiny. In the same way, the fisherman and the marlin were connected like that of the coin and the gas station owner. The gods had spoken.

There are so many things that I loved about this novella that I'm finding it difficult to wrap it up in only 700 words. Yet, I'll leave you with one last thing to note. Hemingway beautifully portrays the mental battle raging in the fisherman's head. Often times I would read the fisherman's thoughts and then the next line discover his dialogue stating the exact opposite. I think this is very essential to a powerful book because humans themselves are not linear thinkers. We often times contradict ourselves on a daily basis, whether it be for better or worse. With that, I highly recommend this short, but compelling read.

"Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky, he thought."

-- Zach