Never give up, be optimistic, pursue, and constantly exceed your limits.

Introduction:

"The Old Man and the Sea" is a novella written by the American writer Hemingway in Cuba in 1951 and published in 1952. The story revolves around an old Cuban fisherman who fights a huge marlin in the Gulf Stream far offshore.

Although the old man in Hemingway's works is tragic, he possesses Nietzsche's "superman" qualities. He accepts failure calmly and faces death calmly and bravely. These "tough guys" embody Hemingway's Philosophy of life and moral ideals, that is, the fighting spirit of human beings who never bow to fate, never admit defeat, and a positive and optimistic attitude towards life. Extended information

Writing background:

The novel "The Old Man and the Sea" is based on a true story. After World War I, Hemingway moved to Cuba and met Gregorio Fuentes, an old fisherman. In 1930, Hemingway's boat sank in a storm, and Fuentes rescued Hemingway. From then on, Hemingway and Fuentes formed a deep friendship and often went fishing together.

In 1936, Fuentes went out to sea and caught a big fish. However, because the fish was too big, it was dragged at sea for a long time. As a result, it was attacked by a shark on the way back. When he came back, he only had A skeleton remains.

In April 1936, Hemingway published an essay called "Over Blue Waters: Letters from the Bay" in "Squire" magazine. One paragraph described an old man who went fishing alone in a small boat. , the story of catching a huge marlin, but most of the fish was eaten by sharks. At that time, this incident deeply touched Hemingway, and he realized that it was a good material for a novel, but he never had the chance to write about it!

Shortly after Christmas in 1950, Hemingway developed a strong desire to create. At the villa "View Club" on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba, he began to write "The Old Man and the Sea" (originally titled "The Old Man and the Sea"). There is a sea"). The first draft was completed on February 23, 1951, which took only eight weeks. In April, Hemingway circulated the manuscript to friends who visited him in Cuba and won unanimous praise.

Article Introduction:

In "The Old Man and the Sea", after three days of exhausting struggle at sea, the old man Santiago finally dragged a huge fish to the coast. Skeleton, in fact, the old man is the winner with nothing. And in the future, people will not be able to believe that this exhausted old man can defeat the endless sea.

In Hemingway's view, life is an unwinnable war, just like the old man's "old sail patched with many flour bags, looking like a flag that will always fail." But the old man never stopped taking action. It was a pursuit in the face of great sorrow, a pursuit in the face of death and failure, and this pursuit was also tenacious and persistent.

From this we can see the poet’s dignity and great spiritual power in Santiago, and it brings a strong aesthetic effect to readers: it makes us deeply aware of the limitation of human life and the human nature. The contradiction between the pursuit of infinity.

On the road of life, who does not experience some setbacks and failures? Are you surrendering at this time? Or fight tenaciously? Santiago's inspiration to us is: Positive progress and action are unyielding actions in the face of inevitable failure. The value and meaning of life lies in the action itself.

So, Hemingway found the soul for his beloved tough guys, and this soul is the eternal value of mankind - the tragic and sublime struggle against fate. What Santiago shows is a deep and strong tragic consciousness of life, which is completely the modern echo of the tragic spirit of ancient Greece.

Although Hemingway's characters are all tragic, they possess Nietzsche's "superman" qualities. They accept failure calmly and face death calmly and bravely. These "tough guys" embody Hemingway's The philosophy of life and moral ideals of human beings are the fighting spirit of never bowing to fate, the fighting spirit of never admitting defeat, and the positive and optimistic attitude towards life.

Hemingway uses symbolic fables to show us mankind's eternal self-verification consciousness across time and space.