And now, a little thing I like to call Books I Should Have Read In High School. As the oh-so-original title suggests, these are books that are commonly on the curriculum lists in high school English classes, but I haven't read. This will probably be its own tag as this blog develops, so watch for it.
Today's book is The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. For those of you who missed this one in school, it's about an unlucky old man who goes out on a deep-sea fishing expedition by himself and nets himself The Big One. However, the fish isn't going to go quietly and drags him around the Gulf for a couple of days. I won't spoil the ending for you.
Now, I'm going to be honest with you here - I really didn't like this book. I don't like stream-of-consciousness narration, for one thing, and the story itself is pretty tedious. I mean, how long can you read about someone getting dragged by a fish that he should have cut loose before you start to root for the sharks?
But I am going to try to give this book a fair shake despite how much I despised it.
One thing I can say for this book is that its stream-of-consciousness and descriptive style really makes you feel like you, too, are trapped on this tiny fishing dinghy with the old man waiting for the fish to tire. You almost start to sympathize with him through the ordeal, too. After all, he's just trying to prove that he's still a productive member of society, and the fish/fate/the Sea is just not going to let him bring back that proof without a fight. He really has to hang in there in spite of his exhaustion, his pain, his hunger and thirst, and his boredom to wear this fish out. He's admirable -- to a point.
Towards the end of the book, and keep in mind that this is a really short book, you are ready for him to just cut the line and bring back at least some of the smaller fish he'd caught. (And for Pete's sake, stop about the baseball!) I mean, there's hanging on out of grit and guts, and then there's just being too stubborn to know when to cut your losses and try again another time. Or maybe that's just my own lack of fortitude speaking.
A lot of people try to draw parallels between this story and Biblical narratives. Maybe because I didn't pay attention in Sunday school, but aside from a few descriptive phrases here and there, I didn't see what they did. Personally, I saw this more as a Greek tragedy. A man is driven by his pride to go do something foolish and dangerous, and ultimately comes back with little to show for his efforts. If he had just swallowed his pride about coming back with a big fish to prove that he's still "got it", then he could have at least come back with a couple of smaller fish to sell at the market.
Now, I'm willing to concede that perhaps I came into this with overly-high expectations. Hemingway is talked up as being this Great Man who influenced all these modern authors, so he has a lot of reputation to live up to. Also, it's possible that he shines more in longer novels despite all the critical praise heaped upon this short novella. I'm willing to try him again in something longer, but probably not for a while.
As far as this being a high school read -- well, it does have a couple of points that make it ideal for high school readers. For one thing, it's short. If you had to read a book over summer break and you were the type of student that left things until the last few days of vacation, this is a good book to check off that requirement (providing, of course, that you can stomach stream-of-consciousness narration). For another, Hemingway claims that he didn't put any intentional symbolism into this story, so there's a lot of room for interpretation and discussion of what the book means to individual readers. If there's one thing I learned from my English teachers, it's that you can find symbolism in everything, even the most straight-foward, utilitarian piece of writing. There are probably English teachers that have written an entire thesis about how the instructions that came with their toaster is a brilliant insight into the moral structures of mankind. And, finally, like most assigned reading books at the high school level, not everyone is going to like it, but at least they will get exposure to a variety of styles and authors.
And this concludes the first of probably many installments of Books I Should Have Read In High School.
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