When Hemingway’s death was reported on 3 July 1961, the obituary in The Tines pronounced pontifically:
No history of the literature of our time will be able to ignore his achievement or his far-reaching influence…his last masterpiece, The Old Man and The Sea, he remained a solitary both in achievement and style…16
And Hemingway’s influence as a stylist was “neatly expressed in the praise of the Noble Prize Committee about ‘his powerful style-forming mastery of the art’ of writing modern fiction.”17
Apart from the language style, which The Old Man and the Sea is famous for, the writing techniques in this novel are also worth paying close attention to. A very important one of them is the way to use facts. The main events of the story seem to be based on a real incident, which is described by Hemingway in an article about fishing in the Gulf Stream in Esquire for April 1936. So the novel of full facts, such as the habit of fish, the technique of catching marlin, the weather, the sea, and so on. But the power of the novel lies in the way to use these facts.
Firstly the facts are selected. “Hemingway’s old man, boy, sea, fish, and sharks are not so much built up in our minds, detail by detail, facts by facts, as drive into our mind by the force and the sympathy with which the author himself shares in their imaginary existence.”18 Like any realist, he relies on selection. When the giant marlin finally surfaces, his tail “was higher than a big scythe blade and a very pale lavender above the dark blue water.”19 Sargasso weed is bleached and yellow by day; Tuna are silver when they jump out if the water, but blue-backed and gold-sides when swimming. Hemingway never described them with excessively, but choose some effective ones. He uses them with a sense of how colors shift and change in their relationship. Without selection, there can be no intensity, and compression.
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