英語文學(xué)論文范文

　　Introduction

　　1. Writing characteristics of the Old Man and the Sea

　　1.1 Hemingway’s Writing Style and Techniques in The Old Man and the Sea

　　The Old Man and the Sea (1952) comes round at the finish of Hemingway’s writing career. With its vivid characterization, its simple language, and the profound implicating it carries, it stands out as one of the excellent books Hemingway’s former stature as the word’s preeminent novelist after Hemingway’s unsuccessful novel Across the River and into the trees (1950). The Old Man and the Sea earned its author the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for 1952, and was instrumental in winning him the Nobel Prize for Literature two years later. It is a short novel about Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman who has gone for 84 days without catch. Therefore the boy, Mandolin, who used to sail with him, is forced to leave him and catch in another ship. The old man insists on fishing alone and at last, he hooks an eighteen-foot, giant marlin, the largest he has ever known. But the fish is very powerful and disobedient. It tows the old man and his boat out to sea for 48 hours, with the old man bearing the whole weight of the fish through the line on his back. The old man, with little food and sleep, has to endure much pain and fights against his treacherous hand cramp. To his great excitement, on his third day at sea, he succeeds in drawing the weakened marlin to the surface and harpoons it. On his way home, he lashes marlin alongside his boat because it is too big to be pulled into the boat. But, unfortunately, the come across sharks in different numbers for four times. The old man fights to kill the sharks with as much might and many weapons as he can summon, but only to find a giant skeleton of his marlin left after his desperate defense. At last, Santiago, having lost what he fought for, reaches the shore and struggles to his shack. He falls into sound sleep, dreaming of Africa, and the 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 novel Hemingway published in his life, The Old Man and the Sea typically reflects his unique writing style. This paper aims to discuss the writing style and techniques in The Old Man and the Sea. Of course, Hemingway has used many techniques in this novel, such as realism, the creation of suspense, monologue, etc. And this paper focuses especially on the language style and one of the important techniques-the way to use facts in this novel.

　　2.Writing of the Old Man and the Sea

　　2.1 Unique language style Old Man and the Sea

　　Hemingway is famous for his language. With much care and effort, he created a very influential and immediately recognizable style. “The style he created in his early work, such as In Our Time and The Sun also Rises, was almost too good. Like the style of certain painters, it tended to become a manner, rather than a flexible way of responding to experience and conveying fresh insights through words.” Among all his works, The Old Man and the Sea is the most typical one to his unique language style. Its language is simple and natural, and has the effect of directness, clarity and freshness. This is because Hemingway always manages to choose words “`concrete, specific, more commonly found, more Anglo-Saxon, casual and conversational.” He seldom uses adjectives and abstract nouns, and avoids complicated syntax. Hemingway’s strength lies in his short sentences and very specific details. His short sentences are powerfully loaded with the tension, which he sees in life. Where he does not use a simple and short sentence, he connects the 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 form “as close to the dramatic as possible, with a minimum of explanatory comment.”Here is an example chosen from The Old Man and the Sea:

　　‘What do you have to eat?’ the boy asked.

　　‘No, I will eat 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 omitted and the words are very colloquial. Thus the speech comes to the reader as if he were listening. Hemingway has captured 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 never as natural as it seems to be. The reasons are as follows. Firstly, in some specific moments, in order to stand out 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 and the fish came over on to his side and swam gently on his side, his bill almost touching the planking of the skiff, and started to pass the boat, long, deep, wide, silver and barred with purple and interminable in the water. The language in this one-sentence paragraph is different from other parts of the novel. Kenneth Graham has commented that the sentence builds up its parts in a carefully laborious sequence-“all his pain and what was left of his strength and his long gone pride”. It emulates the movement of the exhausted marlin and the physical strain of the old man. And it mounts to a heavy crescendo in the very un-prosaic inversion of adjectives-“long, deep, wide”-ending in the virtually poetic cadence, “interminable in the water.”The dialogue, too, is combined with the realistic and the artificial. Usually the content contains and the expression contains the artificial. In The Old Man and the Sea, the language style is very peculiar from Hemingway’s other writings. This is because the novel is an English version of the Spanish that Santiago and Mandolin would speak in real life. “Since we are meant to realize that Santiago and Mandolin could not possibly speak like this, since English is not his tongue anyway, we are more likely to accept other artificialities of the dialogue. Using the device of a pretended ‘translation’, which would be bound to stilt in any case, Hemingway can ‘poetize’ the dialogue as he wishes.”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 slightly strange exchanges like the following become fairly acceptable. For example: