Ernest Hemingway’s Iceberg Narrative Method of The Old Man and the Sea

Abstract

In most of his fictional works and in the line of his previous experience as a journalist and war reporter, Ernest Hemingway developed writing techniques peculiar to him to be followed by many predecessors after him. Among the well-known techniques are the one, in which he called “the iceberg theory.” The present paper concerns itself with analyzing this literary technique used by Hemingway in “The Old Man and the Sea.” This novella, written in 1952, and awarded Nobel Prize 1954 and Pulitzer Prize 1953, achieved a great success not only in the writer’s career but also in the world of fiction as well. Hemingway’s exceptional use of the iceberg technique renowned the novella among his masterpieces and himself as a world Avant-garde in the fictional sphere. This is due to using a simple economical language. Yet, this simple language is full of symbols, metaphors, similes, allusions, personifications, interior monologues, repetitions, soliloquies, etc. All these devices provide another cognitive approach to this story delivered in a much unsophisticated language. This unique style, though written in prose, once has their sentences broken down they may be read as poetic. The aim of this paper is to trace these elements in a novel approach to reading Hemingway’s this masterpiece.

Keywords

• The old man
• Hemingway
• Cognitive reading
• Style
• Figurative language