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Showing posts from March, 2008

The Narrative Techniques and Style of the Language in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea

Generally speaking, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea may be seen as a culmination of his long-drawn experiment spanning over 25 years and speculations towards finding out the means through which the “closed literature” can be converted into “an open one”, that is, to universalise the significance of the themes. He was very much aware of the danger in and difficulties with “closed literature” which in its factual texture, so lightly woven, presents such opacity of vision that the reader is unable to see through it any larger implication and that he may even “find himself squirming with aesthetic claustrophobia”. Hemingway revolted against these stylistic limits which factualistic naturalism necessarily imposes on the sensibility of an artist. In Death and the Afternoon he asserted that the writer of prose ought to aim at “architecture, not interior decoration”; in other words, to provide the particular kind of fenestration through which the reader is able to catch glimpses of large