评老人与海中海明威写作风格和手法AbstractBeing distinguished from many greatest American writers, Hemingway is noted for his writing style. Among allhis works, The Old Man and the Sea is a typical one to his unique writing style and technique. The language issimple and natural on the surface, but actually deliberate and artificial. Sometimes the simple style is madea little different. The dialogue is combined with the realistic and the artificial. The simplicity is highlysuggestive, and often reflects the strong undercurrent of emotion. Occasionally, the author uses some figuresof speech. Hemingway s style is related tohis experience as a journalist, his learning from many famous writers, and most importantly, his conscientiouseffort in looking for a style of his own. The influence of his style is great all over the world.The Old Man and the Sea is full of facts, most of which comes from Hemingway sown experience. So the way to use facts is a very important writing technique in this novel. The facts in thenovel are selected and used as a device to make the fictional world accepted. In the forepart of the novel, theyare used to show the quality of Santiago s life, and are narrated simply and naturally; while in the latterpart ofhe novel, they are used from inside Santiago bvsn consciousness and form part of a whole scheme of thenovel.Keywords: Facts; Simplicity; Artificial; Iceberg Theory中文摘要在众伟大的美国作家中，海明威以独特的写作风格而著称。
在他所有的作品中，老人与海最能体现他独特的写作风格和手法这部小说语言看似简洁自然， 其实包含了作者的精心揣摩和润色加工有时为了突出某一部分，作者会采用长 句代替短句文中的对话内容真实、贴近生活，而表达形式则经过了艺术加工 小说简洁自然的语言背后隐藏了深刻的意义和感情 文中还运用了比喻、拟人等修辞手法.还名位的这种独特风格与他当过新闻记者的经历有关，同时他兼菜各家之长，自成一体，形成了自己独特的创作方法和艺术风格这种风格对整个世界文 坛产生了重要的影响老人与海这部小说中运用了大量的事实，他们大多来自于作者亲身经历海 明威对这些事实精心选择，从而吸引读者的兴趣并使读者有一种身临其境的感觉 小说一开始用大量事实描写了主人公生活的环境，叙述风格简洁自然，未加任何感 情色彩随着情节的发展，大量的事实主要被运用于主人公的心理活动之中，而不 是主要由作者来叙述同时，这些事实构成了整个小说体系中不可缺少的一部分关键词：事实；简洁；加工；冰山理论Hemingway s Writing Style and Techniques in The Old Man and the Sea IntroductionThe Old Man and the Sea (1952) comes round at the finish of Hemingway s writingcareer With its vivid characterization, its simple language, and the profound implicating it carries, it standsout as one of the excellent books Hemingway sstature as the word preeminent novelist after Hemingway unsuccessful novelAcross the River and into the trees (1950). The Old Man and the Sea earned its author the Pulitzer Prize in fictionfor 1952, and was instrumental in winning him the Nobel Prize for Literature two years later It is a short novelabout Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman who has gone for 84 days without catch. Therefore the boy, Mandolin, whoused to sail with him, is forced to leave him and catch in another ship. The old man insists on fishing aloneand at last, he hooks an eighteen-foot, giant marlin, the largest he has ever known. But the fish is very powerfuland disobedient. It tows the old man and his boat out to sea for 48 hours, with the old man bearing the wholeweight of the fish through the line on his back. The old man, with little food and sleep, has to endure much painand fights against his treacherous hand cramp. To his great excitement, on his third day at sea, he succeeds indrawing the weakened marlin to the surface and harpoons it. On his way home, he lashes marlin alongside his boatbecause it is too big to be pulled into the boat. But, unfortunately, the come across sharks in different numbersfor four times. The old man fights to kill the sharks with as much might and many weapons as he can summon, butonly to find a giant skeleton of his marlin left after his desperate defense. At last, Santiago, having lost whathe fought for, reaches the shore and struggles to his shack. He falls into sound sleep, dreaming of Africa, andthe lions again. His struggle wins him much respect.Among many great American writers, Hemingway is famous for his objective and terse prose style. As the last novelHemingway published in his life, The Old Man and the Sea typically reflects his unique writing style. This paperaims to discuss the writing style and techniques in The Old Man and the Sea. Of course, Hemingway has used manytechniques in this novel, such as realism, the creation of suspense, monologue, etc. And this paper focusesespecially on the language style and one of the important techniques-the way to use facts in this novel.Hemingway is famous for his language. With much care and effort, he created a very influential and immediatelyrecognizable style.“The style he created in his early work,such as In Our Time and The Sun also Rises, was almost too good. Likethe style of certain painters, it tendedto become a manner, rather than a flexible way of responding to experience and conveying fresh insights throughwords. ” Among all his works, The Old Man and the Sea is the most typical one to his unique language style. Itslanguage is simple and natural, and has the effect of directness, clarity and freshness. This is because Hemingwayalways manages to choose words“concrete,specific, more commonly found, more Anglo-Saxon, casual and conversational. 2 He seldom uses adjectives and abstractnouns, and avoids complicated syntax.Hemingway s strength lies in his short sentences and very specific details. His short sentences are powerfullyloaded with the tension, which he sees in life. Where he does not use a simple and short sentence, he connectsthe various parts of the sentence in a straightforward and sequential way, often linked by“and” .In his task of creating real people, Hemingway uses dialogue as an effective device. It is presented in a formasclose to the dramatic as possible, with a minimum of explanatory comment. ” 3 Here is an example chosen fromThe Old Man and the Sea:What do you have to eat? the boy asked.No, I wieat at home. Do you want me to make the fire?No, I will make it later on. Or I may eat the rice cold.Here we can see that such interpolations as“ he said ” have frequently been omittedand the words are very colloquial. Thus the speech comes to the reader as if he were listening. Hemingway hascaptured the immediacy of dialogue skillfully and has made the economical speech connotative.But it is good to note that Hemingway s style is deliberate and artificial, and is neveras natural as it seems to be. The reasons are as follows. Firstly, in some specific moments, in order to standout 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 andthe fish came over on to his side and swam genhlis side, his bill almost touching the planking of the skiff, andstarted to pass the boat, long, deep, wide, silver and barred with purple and interminable in the water.5The language in this one-sentence paragraph is different from other parts of the novel. Kenneth Graham has commentedthat the sentence builds up its parts in a carefully laborious sequence- “alhis pain and what was left of hisstrength and his long gone pride ” . It emulates the movement of the exhausted marlin and the physical strainof the old man. And it mounts to a heavy crescendo in the very un-prosaic inversion of adjectives- Tongdeep,wide ”-ending in the virtually poetic cadence, “ interminable in the water 6The dialogue, too, is combined with the realistic and the artificial. Usually the content contains and theexpression contains the artificial. In The Old Man and the Sea, the language style is very peculiar from Hemingways)ther writings. This is because the novel is an English version of the Spanishthat Santiago and Mandolin wouldspeak in real life.“Since we are meant to realize that Santiago and Mandolincould not possibly speak like this, since English is not his tongue anyway, we are more likely to accept otherartificialities of the dialogue. Using the device of a pretendedtranslationwhich would be bound to stilt in any case, Hemingway can poetize tdialogue as he wishes. ” 7 The speakers are distanced from readers to a certain degree.And while their language taking on a kind of epic dignity, it does not lose its convincingness. Even slightlystrange exchanges like the following become fairly acceptable. For example:You re my alarm cjobe boysaid.Age im y alarm clock, the old man said. Why。
old man wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?I don t krtbw bby said. All I know is that young boys sleep late and hardI can remember,ithe old man said. I ll waken you in time. 8The simple sentences and the repeated rhythms hit at the profundities that the surface of the language triesto ignore. Its simplicity is highly suggestive and connotative, and often reflects the strong undercurrent ofemotion. Indeed, the more closely the reader watches, the less rough and simple the characters appear. In Deathin the Afternoon, Hemingway uses an effective metaphor to describe his writing style:If a writer of the prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows andthe reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though thewriter had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water9Among all the works of Hemingway, the saga of Santiago is thought as the most typical one to this 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 narrationand description this gives readers a pictures compression, from which-the 1/8 of the iceberg above water, theycan learn the implying meaning and feelings of the author- 7/8 of the iceberg under water. When Hemingway saidof this story, “ I tried to make a real old man, a real sea and real sharks”，he theon to say,“Butif I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. ” So this novel has a greatand significance conveyed by a compressed action. The core of the novel s action is fishing. To ftehihg is notsimply of contest in life. It contains profound philosophic meaning. In addition, two details -the baseball matchand the hand wresting with the Negro, like fishing, symbolize the contention in life. They compensate and enrichthe inner meaning of the main plot of fishing. So the simplicity of the novel is highly suggestive.Occasionally, the author uses such figures of speech as metaphor, personification, etc to describe details.Hemingway likes to us natural things to make metaphors. For example, he describes Santiagos eyes as “thesamecolor as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated. ” 11The metaphor reveals that the old man is closely linkedwith nature. At the beginning of the novel, a simile is used: thesail was patched with flour sacks and, furled,it looked like the flag of permanent defeat. Here Santiago eyes are contrasted with the patched sail, whichsymbolize defeat, as reveals Santiago s unyielding characterSo Hemingway has formed of narrative and dialogue, though natural and simple on the surface, is actually deliberatedand artificial. It combines elements that are realistic with elements that are stylized and heightened.How Hemingway has formed such a writing style? The reason is related to his own experiences. His use of shortsentences and paragraphs and vigorous and positive language, and the deliberate avoidance of gorgeous adjectivesare some of the traces of his early journalistic practices. 13 After leaving school at 17, he went to theKansasCity Star, which was one of the best newspapers in America at that time. He served as its eager and energeticreporter As a journalist, Hemingway trained himself in the economy of expression. He once said that, during hisworking in Star, he had to learn to use simple sentences, which is very useful to him; and that the experienceof working as a journalist would not do harm to a young writer, instead it is very helpful if he could cast itoff timely. He laid stress on speakingvvith facts and objected groundless concoction in writing. His descriptionsof details are full of factuality, and are as precise as news reports.The influence of Hemingway language style is great. In the latter part of his life, Hemingway was known as “ PapaHemingwa1y4 It refers mainly tohis contributionto the development of a new writing style in America-the colloquial style. His simple word, short sentences andvividly colloquial language purity American novel. In England, which Miss Storm Jameson discussing “TheCraftof the Novelist in the January 1934 issue of The English Review, she advanced an explanation of Hemingway spopularity:It is this simplicity, this appeal to our crudest interests, which explains Hemingway success -IEnglish at leasthis successhas been largely with the intellectuals. Thyhave praised his simplicity, his directness-15When Hemingway 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-reachinginfluence - his last masterpiece, The Old Man and The Sea, he remaineda solitary both in achievement and style-16And Hemingway influence as a stylist was “ neatlysxpressed in the praise of the Noble Prize Committee about hiowerful style-forming mastery of the art of writing modern fiction. ” 17Apart from the language style, which The Old Man and the Sea is famous for, the writing techniques in this novelare also worth paying close attention to. A very important one of them is the way to use facts. The main eventsof the story seem to be based on a real incident, which is described by Hemingway in an article about fishingin the Gulf Stream in Esquire for April 1936. So the novel of full facts, such as the habit of fish, the techniqueof 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 man, boy, sea, fish, and sharks arenot so much built up in our minds, detail by detail, facts by facts, as drive into ourmind by the force and the sympathy with which the author himself shares in their imaginary existence. 18 Likeany realist, he relies on selection. When the giant marlin finally surfaces, his tail “was highyilae laladg?and a very pale lavenderabove the dark blue water ” 19 Sargasso weed is bleached andyellow by day; Tuna are silver when they jumpout 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.Secondly,the facts are used as a device to make the fictional word accepted. The novel is not simply a manualfor us to study the technique to catch a fish or how to survive in a boat. The author tries to implicate people im agination in what is happening by appealing to our love of practical knowledge. This shows “the facts afundamentally a device, a technique of reassuring our sense of everyday values.”So they can help to make us accept more readily what the author has invented and made more dramatic than in everydaylife. Still take the use of color as example: The clouds over the land now rose like mountains and the coast wasonly a long green line with the gray-blue hills behind it. The water was a dark blue now, so dark that it wasalmost purple. As he looked down into it he saw the red sifting of the plankton in the dark water and the strangelight the sun made now.21These facts show readers the process of fishing, which mostly comes from the author own experience. From thesefacts, which are vivid, precise and terse, readers can learn a lot about how to catch a fish and can also feelas if they themselves were catching a fish. Then they will have the sense that what the author describes is realand believable. Therefore, as Kenneth Graham has said, many facts in the novel about fishing and about the seahave a double function: they satisfy people sense of the real word. And this is what underlies Hemingway femousabdigstatement that his intention was always to convey to the reader 22 the way it was.All in all, Hemingway s language in The Old Man and thempiei and natural on the surface, but actually deliberateand artificial. “Thelanguage is rarely emotional. Rather, it controls emotions: it holds them in. 23he formingof this distinct style is related to Hemingway own experience. And the influence of this style is not only withinAmerica but also all over the world. The facts in the novel are selected and used as a device to make the fictionalworld accepted. Unlike other novelists who add allegorical meanings to their facts, Hemingway uses the facts simplyand naturally, without any emotion. In the latter part of the novel, instead of being narrated by the author,the facts are used from inside Santiago own consciousness,and form part of a whole scheme of the novel. Besideswhat have been mentioned above, other techniques in The Old Man and the Sea, such as realism, monologue, the creationof suspense and so on, are also very successful. All these show Hemingway s superb artistic attainments as aNobel Prize winnerNotes:1.Kenneth Graham, commentary in York Notes: The Old Man and the Sea, (Beijing: world Publishing Corporation,1991), p412.Chang Yaoxin, “Chapter 14 in A Survey of American Literature, (TianJin: Nankai University Press, 1987),p3043.Mary A. Campbell, “Study Guide ” in The Old Man and the Sea, (Beijing: world Publishing Corporation, 1998),p1264.Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, (Beijing: world Publishing Corporation, 1998), p85.Ibid, p836.Kenneth Graham, “commentaryin York Notes: The Old Man and the Sea, (Beijing: world Publishing Corporation,1991), p427.Ibid, p458.Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, (Beijing: world Publishing Corporation, 1998), p209.Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, (New York, 1932), p13810.Times, 13 December 1954.11.Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, (Beijing: world Publishing Corporation, 1998), p212.Ibid, p113.Chang Yaoxin, “Chapter 14 in A Survey of American Literature, (Tiamamkan :University Press, 1987), p29514.A.E.Hotchner, Papa Hemingway, (New York: Random House, 1966), pl15.Roger Asselineau, ed, “Hemingway English Reputation ”in The Literary Reputation of Hemingway in Europe,(New York: New York University Press, 1965), p1516.Ibid, p1017.Chang Yaoxin, “Chapter 14 in A Survey of American Literature, (Tiamamkan : University Press, 1987), p30518.Kenneth Graham, “commentaryin York Notes: The Old Man and the Sea, (Beijing: world Publishing Corporation,1991), p2519.Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, (Beijing: world Publishing Corporation, 1998), p7920.Kenneth Graham, “commentaryin York Notes: The Old Man and the Sea, (Beijing: world Publishing Corporation,1991), p2921.Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, (Beijing: world Publishing Corporation, 1998), p2622.Kenneth Graham, “commentaryin York Notes: The Old Man and the Sea, (Beijing: world Publishing Corporation,1991), p2923.Peter B. High, “Chapter 1” in An Outline of American Literature, (New York: Long man Inc., 1986), p147Bibliography:1. Chang Yaoxin, “Chapter 4 in A Survey of American Literature. TianJin: Nankai University Press, 19872. Kenneth Graham, commentary ” in York Notes: The Old Man and thBeijieiai.: world Publishing Corporation,19913. Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea. Beijing: world Publishing Corporation, 19984.崔道怡等编.冰山”理论：对话与潜对话工人出版社，1987.5.刁绍华.海明威.辽宁人民出版社，1980.6.傅景J(I .二十世纪美国小说史.吉林教育出版社，1996。