A.Colloquial and economical Hemingway is famous for his language. With much care and effort, he created a very influential and immediately recognizable style. “The style he created in his early work, such as In Our Time and the Sun also Rises, was almost too good. Like the style of certain painters, it tended to become a manner, rather than a flexible way of responding to experience and conveying fresh insights through words.”
Among all his works, the Old Man and the Sea is the most typical one to his unique language style. Its language is simple and natural, and has the effect of directness, clarity and freshness. This is because Hemingway always manages to choose words “concrete, specific, more commonly found, more Anglo-Saxon, casual and conversational.”
Here is an example chosen from the Old Man and the Sea:
‘What do you have to eat?’ the boy asked.
“A pot of yellow rice with fish. Do you want some?
“No, I will eat at home. Do you want me to make the fire?”
“No, I will make it later on. Or I may eat the rice cold.”
“May I take the cast net?’
“Of course.” 1
Here we can see that such interpolations as “he said” have frequently been omitted and the words are very colloquial. Thus the speech comes to the reader as if he were listening. Hemingway has captured the immediacy of dialogue skillfully and has made the economical speech connotative.
B.Deliberate and artificial
It is good to note that Hemingway’s style is deliberate and artificial, and is never as natural as it seems to be. The reasons are as follows. Firstly, in some specific moments, in order to stand out by contrast and to describe an important turning point or climax, the style is made a little different:
"He took all his pain and what was left of his long gone pride and he put it against the fish"s agony and the fish came over on to his side and swam gently on his side, his bill almost touching the planking of the skiff, and started to pass the boat, long, deep, wide, silver and barred with purple and interminable in the water.
The language in this one-sentence paragraph is different from other parts of the novel. Kenneth Graham has commented that the sentence builds up its parts in a carefully laborious sequence-“all his pain and what was left of his strength and his long gone pride”. It emulates the movement of the exhausted marlin and the physical strain of the old man. And it mounts to a heavy crescendo in the very un-prosaic inversion of adjectives-“long, deep, wide”-ending in the virtually poetic cadence, “interminable in the water.”
The dialogue, too, is combined with the reality and the artificiality. Usually the content contains reality and the expression contains the artificiality. In The Old Man and the Sea, the language style is very peculiar from Hemingway’s other writings. This is because the novel is an English version of the Spanish that Santiago and Mandolin would speak in real life. Since we are meant to realize that Santiago and Mandolin could not possibly speak like this, since English is not his mother tongue anyway, we are more likely to accept other artificialities of the dialogue. Using the device of a pretended ‘translation’, which would be bound to be stilted in any case, Hemingway can ‘poetize’ the dialogue as he wishes.
C.Suggestive and connotative
The speakers are distanced from readers to a certain degree. And while their language takes on a kind of epic dignity; it does not lose its convincingness. Even slightly strange exchanges like the following become fairly acceptable. For example:
‘You’re my alarm clock’, the boy said.
‘Age is my alarm clock’, the old man said. ‘Why does old man wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?’
‘I don’t know’, the boy said. ‘All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard’.
‘I can remember it’, the old man said. ‘I’ll waken you in time.’ 3
The simple sentences and the repeated rhythms hit at the profundities that the surface of the language tries to ignore. Its simplicity is highly suggestive and connotative, and often reflects the strong undercurrent of emotion. Indeed, the more closely the reader watches the less rough and simple the characters appear.
Among all the works of Hemingway, the saga of Santiago is thought as the most typical one to the Iceberg Theory. The author seldom expresses his own feelings directly, nor does he make any comments or explanations. On the contrary, he tries to narrate and describe things objectively and blend his own feelings harmoniously to the natural narration and description which gives readers a compressed pictures, from that of the iceberg above water, they can learn the implying meaning and feelings of the author of the iceberg under water. When Hemingway said about this story, “I tried to make a real old man, a real sea and real sharks”, he then went on to say, “But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things.” 5
So this novel has a great significance conveyed by a compressed action. The core of the novel’s action is fishing. To the hero, fishing is not simply of contest in life. It contains profound philosophic meaning. In addition, two details-the baseball match and the hand wresting with the Negro, like fishing, symbolize the contention in life. They compensate and enrich the inner meaning of the main plot of fishing. So the simplicity of the novel is highly suggestive.
Hemingway likes to use natural things to make metaphors. For example, he describes Santiago’s eyes as “the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.” The metaphor reveals that the old man is closely linked with nature. At the beginning of the novel, a simile is used: “the sail was patched with flour sacks; it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.” 6
Here Santiago’s eyes are contrasted with the patched sail, which symbolizes defeat, as reveals Santiago’s unyielding character.
So Hemingway has well -formed narrative and dialogue, though natural and simple on the surface, are actually deliberate and artificial. It combines elements that are realistic with elements that are stylized.