"The Old Man and the Sea"

Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman, is the hero of the novel. He is an innovative figure for the Hemingway's production because he differs from the typical Hemingway hero: he's old and largely unsuccessfull but he resembles the tradition in his battle against nature and his emblematic role as individual who challenges the fate. Santiago recalls the existential hero of 1950s and the outsider of literary traditions, excluded from the society of fishermen where he lives because of his age and his inability to catch fish anymore. Infact more than a physical test, the battle with nature, in the form of the sea, the sharks and the marlin, is a spiritual battle because the old man can't hope ta catch the fish trought his phisical strongness, he has to use all his experience. His victory against nature becomes a defeat when the catched marlin was devoured by sharks leaving only the bones. However this defeat is transformed into a victory: the fisherman is now respected and respects himself. This story has also some analogies with the story of the Aci-Trezza fishermen, that are strong and unlucky mens, too.
The theme of nature in the story reflects both the American frontier experience and the Romantic pantheistic worship of nature. In The Old Man and the Sea nature is not only the hostile challenge to man's strenght, the sea remains a strong symbol of terrifing natural power, infact in one of the first parts of the book the sea is described in both its aspects: "la mar", the feminine bestowner of favours, and "el mar", the masculine enemy of fisherman. Hemingway reveals a graeat respect for the natural world lyrically describing the beauty of the sea, but in his opinion the power of nature is at best indifferent to man, and at worst hostile.

The Hemingway style is only superficially simple, in reality it is very sophisticated and requires a prepared reader to be understood fully, infact when the artist talked about his style he always said that it is "like an iceberg:there is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows". The writer's grammar is simple, he always uses short sentences connected each other by conjunctions like "and" or "but", and he refuses complex structures and subordinate clauses. The lexis is also simple; Hemingway uses basic verbs like "to be" and neutral abjectives like "nice", there are no elegant words. This apparent semplicity is given by the using of the "objective correlative" technique that was introduced by T.S. Heliot and led Hemingway to create a perfect fusion between facts, objects and symbols. Differently from Verga, Hemingway guides the emotional response of the reader by a musical use of words and colours.