The Old Man and the Sea - Question 8

How accurately does this novel reflect events in history? What responsibilities does the author believe exist between groups of people? What people, ideas and events probably influenced the author?

I really feel like this is a tough question to answer for this book. For books like The Grapes of Wrath or Fahrenheit 451 it would be so much easier to answer because those books covered events in history, real and fictional. This book mainly covered the story of a man trying to catch a fish. People do that all the time. So yes, the book did an excellent job covering the steps that a man must go through to catch a huge fish, minus a little bit of drama. But in all seriousness, the book did display how a fisherman, especially an old fisherman, would have been treated during the 1940's in Cuba. And even worse, the man was not the greatest fisherman, so he was ridiculed even more.

The book was written in 1952, and was set around the same time (1940's). During that time, Joe DiMaggio was a famous baseball player, and he snuck his way into Hemingway's book and actually was used as a major symbol. During the book, the old man was not able to whip out his electronic fish finder and track his monster fish and then shock it with an electric fishing wand. No no, he had to do it the old fashioned way because at the time of the book, there weren't a bunch of fancy tools for cheating.

The author suggested that the relationship between the old and the young was very unorthodox from what we should know today. The younger fisherman were not nice to the old man, and acted as if they were better than him. Okay, so I know that they might have been better fisherman literally, but they were younger and should have respected their elders. Hemingway also stated that the relationship between man and nature was an important one to have. The old man was "one with nature," and guess what; he caught a huge fish. Take that rude younger people.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. Print.