I, like most of my fellow high school students around the world, have always asked this one simple question, one that will most likely be asked by us until we are older and look back and say, “In retrospect, I guess it wasn’t THAT bad,” but right now, it does not seem that way. Anyway, back to the question I’ve been blabbing on about, and that question is “Why in the heck am I really reading a book about some old dude 60 years ago that caught some big fish that ended up getting eaten by sharks in the end” (or at least that is what I’ve been asking).
Now I realize though that it is not what the story about that makes it a classic that teachers want students to read, it is the values and the writing style that makes it unique and timeless, so that no matter what generation you are from, it will still have the same message that it did when it was first written. This book is different from so many others because the way that Hemingway wrote. It did not have unnecessary details that did nothing to further the story or anything that just adds confusion to the story so that maybe a few people who know what the author is talking about actually gets what they are trying to say.
Another thing that I liked most about this book is that since it did not have any unneeded information and other junk like that, it was very, very short. Some books that are horrendously long cough Jane Eyre cough cough are so long that by the time that they get to a part where they connect one event with an answer or a conclusion, the reader has already forgotten what even happened in the first place. I never had to go back and see what a character was referring to, or what the original event that set off other ones even was. That’s how all books should be, short and sweet.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner, 1980. Kindle. Web. 21 June 2011.
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