Deviations from Typical Style in Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea"
The final book of Ernest Hemingway’s writing career was the short novel The Old Man and The Sea . In it he tells the painfully simple story of an elderly man, Santiago, who is pulled out to sea while fighting to catch a huge marlin. It proved to his critics that he was still capable of writing a fully successful story after the critical letdown of his previous novels; however, this novel proved different from those that came before it. The realistic presentation of facts typical of Hemingway’s other works is nearly thrown out the window in this novel as things happen that should not be physically or humanly possible. The central character himself is a stark contrast to many of Hemingway’s other heroes of earlier novels, right down to the ending that Santiago eventually settles into by the conclusion of the novel. Hemingway wrote a number of well-known novels throughout his career, but he abandons many of his characteristic writing conventions in The Old Man and the Sea , and it prov...