sp;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.5
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.”6
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.”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 slightly strange exchanges like the following become fairly acceptable. For example:
‘You’re my&nbs
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