“It was an hour before the first
shark hit.” Ernest Hemingway – The Old Man and the Sea
Hemingway has
had his old man, Santiago, battle age, bad luck, and the mightiest
marlin he has ever seen and he has defeated them all. He has proven
to himself and to the world that he is still a man. And we think
Santiago is triumphantly sailing home to claim his success when
Hemingway punches us in the face with this sentence and lets us know
that there is just this one other little thing to deal with. Simply,
adroitly, Hemingway moves the action to a wider plane. He takes what
had been an intimate one on one combat and throws it into a world
war, an us against them action. And in a world war even the victors
suffer. That is a lot to achieve with one sentence.