The meaning of the work as a whole

My final thoughts on Ernest Hemingway's novel The Old Man and The Sea are just this:

• Although the simple text provides an easy read, it is still enjoyable.
• Contradicting my last statement once you find out there is deeper meaning to the text it becomes even better.
• My past blog post about the book not being of AP merit has shifted a little bit more to the side of yes, because of the deeper meanings that I had not noticed before.
• I recommend this book to people who do not have the time to read a long book.

I think the largest takeaways that I got from the book was about the main character Santiago and his complex relationship with the ocean. This was the part I focused on the most because of all the irony that went along with it. He has such a hard time getting money due to the inability to catch fish yet he needs the ocean to be able to get all of it. It is a sort of love hate relationship that he has going on with the ocean.

When people read this book I suggest that they take it slow and try and break down the book piece by piece. Since there are no chapters this may be challenging to do. Due to the book not being very long you are able to focus more on smaller parts.

I think that this book is really just about how in life there are going to be a lot of downs, but you have to keep trying until you get that one positive, and it will feel so good because of how much effort you have put into it.

Style of this book

Hemingway's style in this book is simple yet uses a bounty of literary elements. As I talked about in my prior posts, he utilizes imagery and sensory details to pull in readers. His syntax is also very simple, sentences are often a good length with almost no complexity to them at all.

This simplicity allowed me to think about the book all together and not have to break it down piece by piece. His tone tends to go up and down with the good and bad that happens to our main character Santiago. An example of this being when Santiago caught the huge Marlin only to have it eaten.

The only problem with the simple style that Hemingway uses is that readers, such as myself, can often read something and not see any deeper meaning to it. This problem happened to me plenty of times as I read the book, and made me go back and really think about what was happening and what it meant to the characters and the readers.

I enjoyed the book and its simple story of the relation ship between an old man and the ocean. It was a book that I would recommend as a personal read and not as a school assignment.