Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
[...] On another and perhaps personal front, while I tend not to like "manly men doing manly things" novels, I didn't read this like that. Perversely, I think the absence of female characters helped in that respect. I don't care for Heminway's women overall, Catherine Barkley being the exemplar for most of them. She's entirely subjective to Frederic Henry's needs and desires even at great cost to herself; Hemingway's projection of the ideal woman, it seems to me. But since Santiago is post-sexual and Manolin is pre-sexual there's no need for the pesky creatures.
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That Hemingway wrote so close to his own life is one of the things I find slightly disturbing about his work: always begging the question is that really the way he saw the people/things around him?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
There was a female marlin in the story: the old man recalled killing her while her companion male marlin watched.
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I certainly don't find this any more of stretch than some of the other things that have been drawn from the story in this thread so far - although I read this scene as intending to humanise the marlin: if they bond like this then they are creatures we can relate to. I did wonder if the reader was supposed to think that maybe this new catch was that earlier male, returned to fulfil his fate next to that his mate (or some such allegorical rubbish -
whoops! Oh dear, my cynicism slipped 
).