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Critical Analysis Of The Old Man And The Sea

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“This is the worst book I’ve ever read”, “Why do we have to read this?”, “The school making us read this is basically child cruelty”. Okay maybe that last judgement was a tad dramatic but I will NOT say it is completely wrong. These were just a few comments thrown around the Bishop Tyrrell English classroom when the students were forced told to read the Novella called The Old Man and the Sea. Ernest Hemingway was an American Novelist, short story writer and journalist. No one liked his work before he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, and frankly I think it should have stayed that way. Hemingway tried to mix up the traditional style of writing when creating the novella that went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature.
The Old Man and the Sea is a short story about an old man called Santiago, who was a well-known, successful fisherman that falls into a dry spell of 84 days. However, this does not deter him as fishing is not only his means to eat and survive, it is also something that he finds entertaining and he does not want to quit, even when a giant fish is so strong it hauls him out to sea and his aged body cannot haul it into the boat (not that it would fit). With the story being about fishing it’s no wonder the class was drifting off when reading page 1.
The renowned author expresses his goal in writing by saying “You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it

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