Hemingway uses much interior monologue for Santiago as he
ventures out alone on the sea to battle the marlin and the
sharks.
Santiago talks directly to the fish, as if they are
brothers, in the first person singular (I), plural (we), and second person familiar
(you):
Fish, I
love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day
ends.My choice was to go there and find him beyond all
people. Beyond all people in the world. Now we are joined together and have been since
noon. And no one to help either of
us.
Hemingway uses interior
monologue for practical purposes: Santiago is alone for over half the novella. It is
also realistic for an old man to mutter to himself. His de facto
audience is us, of course, but also Manolin and the sea and fish. Children and nature
are coupled together for a reason: it's a Biblical parable. Jesus spoke thusly to his
disciples and children, his preferred audiences (rather than the formal language of the
Pharisees).
Hemingway writes the dialogue in English
instead of Santiago's native Spanish. Hemingway uses a few Spanish words ("la mar") to
achieve some realism, but--overall--we can tell that Hemingway's not translating from
one language to another. Rather, he writes in plain English, as if Santiago was
speaking it for the first time. Regardless of language, Santiago would not delve into
verbally complex soliloquies or stream-of-consciousness because he is a fisherman.
Certainly not in English.
Hemingway, as a journalist, is
all about ethos (credibility) in his writing and characters. He is
writing a parable, a morality tale of a fisherman, not unlike the Biblical Jonah or
Jesus. As such, he writes in the language of humility and simplicity, unadorned by
hubris or stylistic experimentation. Hemingway will save the
soliloquies and stream-of-consciousness for the poets and modernist contemporaries like
Faulkner or Woolf.
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