SOURCE: "The Old Man and the Sea: Hemingway's Tragic Vision of Man," in American Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4, January, 1960, pp. 446-55.

In the following essay, Burhans asserts that in his novella Hemingway uses "perfectly realized symbolism and irony" to affirm the values of courage, love, humility, solidarity, and interdependence.

I

In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway uses an effective metaphor to describe the kind of prose he is trying to write: he explains that "if a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water."¹

Among all the works of Hemingway which illustrate this metaphor, none, I...