As I was reading The Old Man the and Sea, there was a line that really caught my eye and got me thinking. "...they went through this fiction every day." (page 16) This referring to the boy asking to take the cast net and the old man asking the boy if he wanted fish with yellow rice.
It is quite a sad thought, really. I am not sure if the old man was in on this fiction and just pretending so he can feel happier, but I am pretty sure his memory was just starting to go, so the boy kept the repetition of the daily routine that he knew the old man liked. It also makes me wonder how bad his memory really is. It must be fairly bad. It also makes me wonder how his memory is fading. It could just be old age. The book never specified how old exactly he is. Maybe it's just genetics, like his dad had really bad memory or Alzheimer's or something. The last thing I think could be possible, and which raises far more questions, is maybe he got injured in the head somehow. He is a fisherman, however, which can definitely cause some injuries here and there, and the book says how he hasn't caught a fish in a really long time. So there could be a link to these daily fictions and not catching any fish in so long.
Back the quote, though. I just really like it a lot. I am sure there are people that go through fictions everyday. Not saying they have memory problems, but they have this lie that they tell themselves, and then they start believing it. Maybe, they could be in denial about something. There are people who tell other people different fictions every day, whether it is for better or for worse. The boy was doing it for the better, obviously. There are just so many possibilities! This just really gets me thinking.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. Print.
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