On page 43 out of 127
Note: Our versions of the book differ (Mine isn’t illustrated, Abby’s is), so the page numbers/number of pages will differ. It’s a real bummer, since I really like picture books. It’s also a bummer because my version of the book is ridiculously overpriced. Eh. Onto the review, post, commentary, analysis, whatchamacallit.
After analyzing several poems with complicated language and trying to figure out the not-so-straightforward ideas in them, the simplistic plot of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea has been extremely refreshing. However, it took some getting used to. I found myself rereading sentences because they took actions and compressed them into such simple phrases I needed more time to visualize what had just happened. It starts off with an interesting plot, but it isn’t interesting enough. There’s a boy who’s always addressed as by “the boy”, and there’s an old man who’s always addressed as “the old man”. The first twenty pages are spent describing the relationship between the two and the poverty the old man faces and the old man’s unlucky fishing past, along with a very controlled conversation about baseball where the voices between the old man and the boy blend together because the dialogue isn’t characterized enough. The baseball conversation references to some players that I’ve never heard of and I doubt most of the people who read this book will understand because most readers of Hemingway aren’t exactly baseball fanatics, and even if they are the baseball conversation isn’t really relevant to anything. It also contains a bunch of dialogue that each of them seem to know is imaginary but that both of them seem unsure of, so the reader can’t be sure of it, and I haven’t found any part of it very helpful to the plot in any way. The second twenty pages are filled with descriptions of the old man going fishing and how he keeps following a bird to get the fish the bird seems to find. Then, he almost catches a dolphin. But he doesn’t. And he assumes that there’s a stray one around. It’s a little too optimistic for his bad luck streak he appears to have, and I can’t tell if it’s still part of his “imaginary” dialogue seeping into his personal thoughts.
My favorite part? When he sees a Portuguese man-of-war and uses the most description used in the entire 43 pages so far. And then…“‘Agua mala’, the man said. ‘You whore’”(Hemingway 35).
That’s right. He calls a jellyfish a whore. If there’s anything in the world I would’ve least expected, it was the combination of those two words. And there’s good reason to it, too. Hemingway goes on to explain by saying that the Portuguese man-of-war looks pretty, but stings hard, and then has the old man talk about how much he likes turtles because they eat the Portuguese man-of-war. In this, I find some probably unintended amusement, where first, we have jellyfish whores, and then, we have, by the symmetric property, whore-eating turtles.
However, the book quickly shuffles backward into its original state, except the old man finally catches something: An albacore tuna that he decides to use as bait, despite his poor living conditions, apparent bad luck streak, and the fact that the boy has already given him bait and appears to have the intent to continue doing so. However, the old man’s delight is very short-lived and confusing to me, since for some reason he has gone forty day’s without a fish, but right after catching a fish, tries to trace back to when he first started talking to himself. Then, he says something to himself about baseball, only to quickly tell himself not to think about baseball. Which makes me wonder: “What is the importance of baseball in a story about fishing? Did the random though of baseball even have to be mentioned?”
Unfortunately, our page division ends right in the middle of one of the seemingly important parts of the story where he is, so far, almost catching another big sea creature. Maybe, it’ll be one of his beloved sea-turtles. I’d be interested to see the inner conflict in him under that occurrence.
