ngway in an article about fishing in the Gulf Stream in Esquire for April 1936. So the novel of full facts, such as the habit of fish, the technique of catching marlin, the weather, the sea, and so on. But the power of the novel lies in the way to use these facts.
Firstly the facts are selected. “Hemingway’s old man, boy, sea, fish, and sharks are not so much built up in our minds, detail by detail, facts by facts, as drive into our mind by the force and the sympathy with which the author himself shares in their imaginary existence.”18 Like any realist, he relies on selection. When the giant marlin finally surfaces, his tail “was higher than a big scythe blade and a very pale lavender above the dark blue water.”19 Sargasso weed is bleached and yellow by day; Tuna are silver when they jump out if the water, but blue-backed and gold-sides when swimming. Hemingway never described them with excessively, but choose some effective ones. He uses them with a sense of how colors shift and change in their relationship. Without selection, there can be no intensity, and compression.
Secondly, the facts are used as a device to make the fictional word accepted. The novel is not simply a manual for us to study the technique to catch a fish or how to survive in a boat. The author tries to implicate people’s imagination in what is happening by appealing to our love of practical knowledge. This shows “the facts are fundamentally a device, a technique of reassuring our sense of everyday values.”20 So they can help to make us accept more readily what the author has invented and made more dramatic than in everyday life. Still take the use of color as example:
The clouds over the land now rose like mountains and the coast was only a long green line with the gray-blue hills behind it. The water was a dark blue now, so d
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