The old man and the sea composition of the work. Ernest Hemingway, "The Old Man and the Sea" - analysis. Preface to The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea in 1951 in Cuba. In 1952 the book was published under the English title The old Man and the Sea.

This short story became not only the most famous, but also the last published work of Hemingway during his lifetime. Ernest Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954 for The Old Man and the Sea.

“Read what I write and look for nothing but your own pleasure. And if you find anything else, it will be your contribution to what you read. There has never been a good book that has come out of a preconceived symbol, baked into a book, like raisins in a sweet bun ... I tried to give a real old man and a real boy, a real sea and a real fish, and real sharks. And, if I managed to do it well enough and truthfully, they, of course, can be interpreted in different ways.
E. Hemingway

Information about the book "The Old Man and the Sea"

Date of writing: 1952
Year of publication: 2008
Title: The Old Man and the Sea
Author: Ernest Miller Hemingway
ISBN: 5-17-052511-7
Translator: E. Golysheva and B. Izakova
Copyright holder: IZD-VO "AST"

The history of the creation of the work "The Old Man and the Sea"

The first story about an old Cuban fisherman and a boy whose boat sailed across the ocean, drawn by a huge fish, was published in 1936 in Esquire magazine. In his documentary essay “On blue water. Gulf Stream Letter” Ernest Hemingway shared with readers the real story of a Cuban who caught the biggest fish in his life and could not bring it to the shores of Havana because of the sharks. Modern literary scholars believe that the writer's friend, the Cuban fisherman Gregory Fuentos, became the prototype of the protagonist. Some researchers believe that the artistic image of the old man was created from many fishermen who inhabited the Havanese village of Kochimare.

The main image of a fishing boat drifting in the ocean, the writer “peeped” during one of his sea ​​voyages. According to eyewitnesses, Hemingway was extremely interested in a small boat moving after a huge fish. The writer asked his captain to come closer to the boat and came across a terrible curse from an old man sitting in it. Together with the old fisherman there was also a boy ... In order not to interfere with fishing, Hemingway moved away from the boat at a decent distance, but all day long he watched the fascinating process from afar.

Hemingway was himself a fisherman. By the age of eight, he knew the names of all the plants and animals that surrounded him in the Midwest, but he had a particular fondness for water creatures. It is no coincidence that Hemingway caught the largest flying fish in the Atlantic. Having conceived the work of his whole life, the writer again turned to the topic that was most familiar and interesting to him. The story was completed in October 1951 and published in September 1952 in Life magazine. And that old man, fishing in the ocean, Hemingway brought food at sunset, but was met with the same abuse of a man engaged in hard male labor.

Quotes from Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea"

We are all made for our own business, he thought. Your talent is expressed in how you earn your living.

Isn't it strange that not loving her, replacing love with a lie, he could not give her more for her money than to other women whom he really loved.

There is no point in thinking about what is sinful and what is not sinful. It's too late to think about it now, and besides, let those who are paid for it deal with sins. Let them think about what sin is.

“…Why do old people wake up so early?” Is it really to prolong this day for yourself at least?
- Don't know. I only know that young people sleep long and soundly.

— Big fish come in September. Everyone knows how to fish in May.

- Fish, - he said, - I love and respect you very much. But I will kill you before the evening comes.

“It is impossible for a person to remain alone in old age,” he thought. - However, it is inevitable. I should not forget to eat the tuna before it goes rotten, because I must not lose strength. I should not forget to eat it in the morning, even if I am not hungry at all. Just don't forget, he repeated to himself.

I wonder why she suddenly surfaced, the old man thought. “You'd think she just surfaced to show me how big she is. Well, now I know. Too bad I can't show her what kind of person I am. Suppose she would then see my reduced hand. Let her think better of me than I really am, and then I will really be better. I wish I was a fish and that I had everything that she has, and not just the will and quick wits.

You didn't kill a fish just to sell it to others to keep yourself alive, he thought. - You killed her out of pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved this fish while it was alive, and you love it now. If you love someone, it is not a sin to kill him. Or maybe, on the contrary, even more sinful?

Preface to The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The story "The Old Man and the Sea" is about the meaning of life. Literary critics call this work a philosophical parable. Why?

A parable is an allegorical story with a moralizing conclusion. Ideal, wisdom is always contained in a parable.

What is the meaning of life?

This is what a person lives for, what he believes in, what he aspires to. I would like to recall the words of A.P. Chekhov. It was this writer that Hemingway admired and diligently studied from him for brevity and content, the mastery of subtext. Chekhov has a story "On the Way", one of the characters of which says: "If a Russian person does not believe in God, then this means that he believes in something else."

In the drama “Three Sisters”, one of the sisters, Masha, thinks: “It seems to me that a person should be a believer or seek faith, otherwise his life is empty, empty.”

A person needs faith. But what should he believe? The answer is Hemingway's decision is contained in the story "The Old Man and the Sea".

The work has everything that the modern world lacks, and especially young people. It is no coincidence that in a television interview after the Nobel Prize, Hemingway called his work “a message to the younger generation”

"The Old Man and the Sea"(The Old Man And The Sea) is a 1952 short story by Ernest Hemingway. Tells the story of old man Santiago, a Cuban fisherman, and his struggle with a giant fish that became the biggest prey of his life.

History of creation

The idea of ​​this work matured in Hemingway for many years. Back in 1936, in the essay "On Blue Water" for Esquire magazine, he described a similar episode that happened to a Cuban fisherman.

The story itself was published in September 1952 in Life magazine. Already after the publication of the story, Hemingway revealed his creative idea in one interview. He said that the book "The Old Man and the Sea" could have more than a thousand pages, every villager could find his place in this book, all the ways in which they earn a living, how they are born, study, raise children. It's all well done by other writers. In literature, you are limited by what has been satisfactorily done before. So I should try to find out something else. First, I have tried to omit everything unnecessary in order to convey my experience to the readers in such a way that after reading it becomes part of their experience and seems to have really happened. This is very difficult to achieve and I have worked very hard on it. In any case, in short, this time I was incredibly lucky, and I was able to convey the experience in full, and at the same time such an experience that no one has ever conveyed. In 1953, Ernest Hemingway received the Pulitzer Prize for his work, in 1954 - Nobel Prize on literature.

Plot

For 84 days, old Cuban fisherman Santiago goes out to sea and can't catch anything. And only his little friend Manolin continues to help him, although his father forbids him to go fishing with old Santiago. They are still friends and often talk about this and that. On the 85th day, the old man goes to sea, as usual, on his sailing boat, and luck smiles at him - a marlin about 5.5 meters long comes across the hook. The old man regrets that there is no boy with him, it is not easy to cope alone. Within a few days, a real battle takes place between the fish and the person. The old man was able to handle with his bare hands a fish that was longer than his boat and armed with a sword. But the marlin takes the boat far into the sea, it is not enough to catch a fish - you still have to swim to the shore with it. On the blood from the wounds of the fish, sharks gather to the old man's boat and devour the fish. The old man enters into a fight with them, but here the forces are not equal. When he reaches the shore, the fish is left with only a skeleton, a head and a sword, which Santiago gives the boy as a keepsake.

The great American writer Hemingway was born in Oak Park, a quiet and orderly suburb of Chicago.

"The writer's father Clarence Hemingway was a doctor, but the main passion of his life was hunting and fishing, and he instilled a love for these activities in his son" [Gribanov B. Ernest Hemingway: life and work. Afterword / B. Gribanov// Hemingway E. Favorites. M.: Enlightenment. 1984. - S. 285.].

Hemingway experienced the first joy of communicating with nature in the forests of Northern Michigan, where the family spent the summer months on the shores of Lake Boulder. The impressions he received there will later provide rich material for his work. Hemingway wanted to be a writer since childhood. Identifying himself with his hero Nick Adams, he wrote many years later: "Nick wanted to become a great writer. He was sure that he would become one" [Hemingway E. Selected / E. Hemingway-M .: Ripol classic, 1999. - S. 309.].

This is a very important statement for the writer, it contains the key to one of major topics of all his work - about the earth, which "abides forever." Like any great writer, he sought and found his own way in literature. One of his main goals was clarity and brevity of expression. "A mandatory feature of a good writer is clarity. The first and most important thing is to expose the language and make it clean, cleansing it to the bone, and this requires work" [Gribanov B. Ernest Hemingway: life and work. Afterword / B. Gribanov // Hemingway E. Favorites. M.: Enlightenment. 1984. - S. 285.].

Around the American writer Ernest Hemingway, legends developed during his lifetime. Having made the leading theme of his books the courage, resilience and perseverance of a person in the fight against circumstances that doom him to almost certain defeat in advance, Hemingway strove to embody the type of his hero in life. A hunter, fisherman, traveler, war correspondent, and when the need arose, then a soldier, he chose the path of greatest resistance in everything, testing himself "for strength", sometimes risking his life not for the sake of thrills, but because a meaningful risk, like he thought, befits a real man.

The works of the 1920s and 1930s by Hemingway are filled with a sharp sense of tragedy. An indelible mark on his soul, a heart wound that never closes, riddled with bitter pain, was left by the events that he witnessed in his youth: this is the first World War and the gravest suffering of the civilian population. Hemingway often recalled what he observed as a European correspondent for a Canadian newspaper covering the events of the Greco-Turkish War. These terrible sufferings of the people affected their worldview. “I remember,” Hemingway wrote, “when I returned home from the Middle East with a completely broken heart and

Paris was trying to decide whether I should devote my whole life trying to do something about it, or become a writer. And I decided, cold as a snake, to become a writer and write all my life as truthfully as I can" [Hemingway E. Collected Works / E. Hemingway - M .: Hood. lit., 1968. - V. 1. - S. 123.].

Doomed to failure, the pursuit of elusive happiness, shattered dreams and hopes, loss of inner balance, the tragedy of human life - this is what Hemingway saw in the surrounding gloomy reality.

Gribanov's article "A Man Cannot Be Defeated" also talks about what Hemingway felt and expressed in his early works. Hemingway's man intuitively, and later consciously, aspires to his origin, to nature. And at the same time, the post-war character begins to fight with her in order to eventually achieve harmony. But this turns out to be impossible for him. Nature is incredibly difficult to enslave and conquer. She, in the end, turns out to be more powerful than a person imagined her.

The fifties are the last decade of Hemingway's life. Its beginning was marked by intensive work on the story "The Old Man and the Sea".

Illness and various unpleasant life events, as well as creative throwing and the search for the meaning of life, distracted Hemingway from working on the "big book". But he was still, as always, worried about the theme of unbending courage, resilience and inner victory in defeat itself.

The first approach to the topic should be considered the essay "On Blue Water", "The Gulf Stream Letter", published back in April 1936 in Esquire magazine. The essay told about an old man who was fishing in the sea, how he caught a huge marlin, which he fought for several days, until he pulled him up to the boat, and how his prey was torn to pieces by sharks that attacked her. It was a sketch of the plot in its general form, which was transformed, overgrown with many new details and details, enriched with deep life and philosophical content.

However, the 16-year-old path from essay to story was not at all direct. Hemingway had completely different thoughts and themes: Spain, China, the Second World War. In the post-war years, Hemingway conceived and made the first drafts of a large epic work, a trilogy dedicated to "land, sea and air." Then the writer suffered an inevitable creative crisis.

Hemingway in his essays described the history of the creation of this story and work on it. When asked how the idea for this story came about, Hemingway replied in 1958: "I heard about a man who got into such a situation with a fish. I knew how it happens - in a boat, on the high seas, one on one with a big fish. I took a man whom he had known for twenty years, and imagined him under such circumstances" [Ernest Hemingway on his work // Questions of Literature. - 1960. - No. 1.- P. 156.]

He intended to place the story of the old fisherman in that part of the vast canvas of the work, which would tell about the sea. When the idea crystallized, Hemingway began to write rapidly, in one breath. During this time, he experienced an inspiring return

creative forces. As always, Hemingway was very demanding of himself. In a letter to the publisher C. Scribner in October 1951, Hemingway reported: “This is the prose on which I have been working all my life, which should be light and concise, and at the same time convey all the changes in the visible world and the sphere of the human spirit. This is the best prose that I am now capable of" [Ernest Hemingway on his work // Questions of Literature. - 1960. - No. 1. - S. 157.].

In September 1952, The Old Man and the Sea was published in Life magazine.

The story speaks for itself, no matter how you interpret it. Hemingway himself, with mocking slyness, shied away from interpreting this story and in a 1954 interview said: “I tried to give a real old man and a real boy, a real sea and a real fish, and real sharks. And if I managed to do it well enough and truthfully, they can be interpreted in many ways. What is really difficult is to create something really true, and sometimes more true than the truth itself. "

The 200-word essay "On the Blue Stream," about a Cuban fisherman who caught a big tuna and fought off a flock of sharks for a long time, ended with the words: "When the fishermen picked him up, the old man sobbed, half-mad from his loss, and in the meantime, the sharks still walked around his boat."

The story was a huge success, both among critics and among the general reader, causing worldwide resonance and countless interpretations, often contradicting each other. Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for his excellent book.

Composition

At the lesson foreign literature we studied the work of E. Hemingway "The Old Man and the Sea". Literary critics define the genre of this work as a story-parable, i.e. a work that tells about the fate and certain events of the hero's life, but this story has an allegorical character, deep moral and philosophical content. The story is closely connected with all the previous works of the writer and looks like the pinnacle of his thoughts about the meaning of life. The story can be told in a few sentences. There lived a lonely old fisherman. IN Lately fishing fate, like people, left him, but the old man did not give up. He goes out to sea again and again, and in the end he is happy: a huge fish is caught on the bait, the struggle between the old man and the fish lasts for several days, and the man wins, and the gluttonous sharks attack the fisherman's prey and destroy it. When the old man's boat comes ashore, only the skeleton remains of the beautiful fish. The exhausted old man returns to his poor hut.

However, the content of the story is much broader and richer. Hemingway likened his works to an iceberg, which is only a small part visible from the water, and the rest is hidden in the ocean space. Artistic text- that part of the iceberg that is visible on the surface, and the reader can only guess what the author left unsaid, left it for the reader to interpret. Therefore, the story has a deep symbolic content.

The title of the work evokes certain associations, hints at the main problems: man and nature, mortal and eternal, ugly and beautiful, etc. The union "and" ("The Old Man and the Sea") unites and at the same time opposes these concepts. The characters and events of the story concretize these associations, deepen and sharpen the problems stated in the title. The old man symbolizes human experience and at the same time its limitations. Next to the old fisherman, the author depicts a little boy who is learning and learning from the old man. And when the old fisherman is not happy, the parents forbid the boy to go to sea with him. In a fight with a fish, the old man really needs help, and he regrets that there is no boy nearby, and understands that this is natural. Old age, he thinks, should not be lonely, and this is inevitable.

The theme of human loneliness is revealed by the author in the symbolic paintings of a fragile boat against the backdrop of a boundless ocean. The ocean symbolizes eternity and irresistible natural force. Hemingway is sure that a person can be destroyed, but not defeated. The old man brought his ability to resist nature, he withstood the hardest test in his life, because, despite his loneliness, he thought about people (memories of the boy, their conversations about an outstanding baseball player, about sports news support him at a moment when his strength almost left).

At the end of the story, Hemingway also touches on the topic of misunderstanding between people. He depicts a group of tourists who are amazed only by the size of the skeleton of the fish and do not understand at all the tragedy of the old man, about which one of the heroes is trying to tell them. The symbolism of the story is complex, and each reader perceives this work according to his experience.

Other writings on this work

Man and nature (based on the novel by E. Hemingway "The Old Man and the Sea") Man and nature (based on the story by E. Hemingway "The Old Man and the Sea") (First version) Old man Santiago defeated or victorious "The Old Man and the Sea" - a book about a man who does not give up Analysis of Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" The main theme of Hemingway's novel "The Old Man and the Sea" Problems and genre features of E. Hemingway's story "The Old Man and the Sea" A hymn to man (based on the novel by E. Hemingway "The Old Man and the Sea") Courageous hero of a courageous writer (based on Hemingway's story "The Old Man and the Sea") "Man was not created to suffer defeat" (According to E. Hemingway's story "The Old Man and the Sea") The plot and content of the story of the parable "The Old Man and the Sea" The world was excited by the magnificent story "The Old Man and the Sea" Features of Hemingway's style

The Old Man and the Sea is a 1952 short story by Ernest Hemingway. Tells the story of old man Santiago, a Cuban fisherman, and his struggle with a giant fish that became the biggest prey of his life.

Plot: 84 days old Cuban fisherman Santiago goes to sea and can't catch anything. Even his little friend Manolin almost stopped helping him, although they are still friends and often talk about this and that. On the 85th day, the old man goes to sea, as usual, on his sailing boat, and luck smiles at him - a marlin about 5.5 meters long comes across the hook. The old man regrets that there is no boy with him, it is not easy to cope alone. Within a few days, a real battle takes place between the fish and the person. The old man was able to handle with his bare hands a fish that was longer than his boat and armed with a sword. But the marlin takes the boat far into the sea, it is not enough to catch a fish - you still have to swim to the shore with it. On the blood from the wounds of the fish, sharks gather to the old man's boat and devour the fish. The old man enters into a fight with them, but here the forces are not equal. When he reaches the shore, the fish is left with a skeleton, a head, and a sword, which Santiago gives the boy as a keepsake.

Literary researchers call the story of the outstanding American writer E. Hemingway (1898-1961) "The Old Man and the Sea" a "parable", probably this is true. Since this, on the one hand, is a very realistic work - not a simple description of an interesting adventure, not just a story about the duel of a brave old fisherman with the sea and fish. This story has a much broader and generalized content, which is not limited to the author's idea of ​​the need for a person to maintain courage and dignity under any circumstances.

A parable is a story that is instructive in nature. Reading Hemingway, we often come across philosophical themes, such as unity with nature, courage and heroism, old age and youth, and, finally, the place of man in life. Why did Santiago beat the fish? He won because he saw the meaning of life in the struggle, he knew how to endure suffering and not lose hope. Hemingway says in this work that Man can be destroyed, but not defeated. That is the main idea of ​​the story.

Hemingway's parable of the old man and the sea is also about humility and fortitude. Faith is a key concept in The Old Man and the Sea

Although he did not read the Lord's Prayer a hundred times within the narrative, he acquired that helplessness that is necessary for faith.

The sharks ate the fish because it's not about luck: sometimes happiness is expensive. Because everything is not really in the hands of the old man. Because you don't really have to ask for something that isn't yours. The old man repented that he had killed the fish. He killed the fish because he was proud, he thought that this was his proud destiny. “... But in fact, you need to love what they give you. After all, God is good, He gives what is asked of him. ( If you ask for a fish, will He give a snake?)…” But not everything a person can take.

42. The Phenomenon of Postmodernism in the Literature of the 1950s-1990s.

The term "postmodernism" appeared during the First World War in the work of W. Pannwitz "The Crisis of European Culture" (1917). In 1947, Toynbee in the book "The Study of History" uses it in a cultural sense. In his opinion, postmodernism symbolizes the end of Western dominance in religion and culture. In the 1960s and 1970s, the term "postmodernism" was also used to define stylistic trends in architecture that were directed against faceless standardization and technicism. Soon he comes to literature and painting.

The development of the concept of "postmodernism" was facilitated by the thoughts of the philosophers J. Derridi, J. Battey, J.-F. Lyotard, as well as the concept of the semiotician and writer U. Eco.

Postmodernism is, first of all, a special worldview, a spiritual state that characterizes the crisis era. This state is characterized by feelings of disappointment, confusion, despair, exhaustion of being. Postmodernism does not leave any hope, it certifies crisis moments in the development of society and man, which, in the figurative expression of U. Eco, “ are on the edge of the abyss ". There is nowhere to go now. To a person who has found himself on the edge of the abyss, everything opens up from a completely different perspective - both life and death, and it is his existence, which brings him to this terrible state. And since any real step can be the last, there is only one thing left to do: to take a mental step in the direction of oneself, to look into oneself, to look at oneself and the world from the position of this extreme boundary. And this look, which is perceived as “the last one,” since there is nowhere to go further, reveals the whole unconcealed truth of an unsettled and still not properly arranged human life, devoid of a lofty goal, spiritual meaning. But, postmodernism is not just a crisis worldview, but also an awareness of the crisis and self-awareness of oneself in this crisis, restless, unsteady world, where the very foundations of being are being destroyed. And this moment - awareness and self-awareness - makes the works of postmodernism relevant for our time.

Postmodernism reflects the general absurdity of life, the rupture of social and spiritual ties, the loss of moral guidelines in society. Disharmony and destruction are such main features of the postmodern art world. There is nothing definite or permanent here. This world is terrible and chimerical. It scares away with its confusion and uncertainty, the depth of the crisis and hopelessness.

The work of postmodernism is presented not as a finished thing, but as a process of interaction between the artist and the text, the text with the space of culture and social space, the text with the artist, and so on. Here we are talking about a specific feature of postmodern writing, which provides for an underlined conventionality of what is depicted. The work is a so-called conditional text and a conditional world. And everything in this artistic world obeys the rules of the aesthetic game. The game principle is inherent in most of the works of postmodernism. Readers get the impression that the characters do not live, but play in life. And the artist does not seem to write, but plays literature, plays with the reader. According to the laws of the game in postmodern works, various events can occur on the verge of the real and the unreal. The game gives the opportunity to freely move from one time to another, from reality to the world of the subconscious, etc. The question arises: why this game, this emphatically conditional aesthetic activity? .. And the point is that an aesthetic game is capable of turning a tragedy into a farce, that is, in a certain way, overcoming the tragedy of being, at least on an aesthetic level. In addition, aesthetic play, a kind of theatricalization of art, allows the artist, together with the reader, to replay certain situations, look not only into the innermost corners of reality, but also into themselves, and finally free a person from the oppression of a difficult reality, the existing absurdity.

If modernism experimented with form, then postmodernism experiments with meaning and content.