The Man and the Marlin

[setsuled]

An old man risks his life for his livelihood in Ernest Hemingway's final completed work, the 1951 novella The Old Man and the Sea. Just an average old man in Cuba, going out to sea to catch fish. But extraordinary because of all he knows about the sea, because of all he's able to endure not just for his age but for anyone. And, yet, again, this kind of extraordinary must be kind of ordinary in such a fishing community.

We're treated to little snippets of the man's past. Maybe he's not so average. He reminisces about winning an arm wrestling competition and about the Canary Islands and lions on an African beach. Mostly he's alone throughout the story and Hemingway uses a nice technique for dialogue, having the old man give a back and forth between what he speaks and what he thinks. It's one of the most natural internal dialogues I've ever come across in fiction.

This one old man manages the tiller and the sail on his little skiff while worrying about his harpoon and the line that finally connects him to an enormous marlin. He's old and he can't do this forever. But what else can he do? Anyway, it's a magnificent way to live as well as wretched.