SOURCE: "They Went Through This Fiction Every Day': Informed Illusion in The Old Man and the Sea" in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. XII, No. 4, Winter, 1966-67, pp. 473-77. [In the following essay, Sylvester rejects Robert P. Weeks's assessment that in The Old Man and the Sea Hemingway's "view of the world has gone soft," arguing that the "calculated fictions" of the exchanges between Santiago and Manolin in the opening and closing of the novella frame the action and reveal a complex Hemingway "code hero" who accepts his fate while concocting an informed illusion about his circumstances.]

Carlos Baker writes of what he calls Colonel Cantwell's "informed illusion" in Across the River and Into the Trees: the Colonel "well knows that the necessary thing to retain, after the loss of any illusion, is the capacity for belief which made the original illusion possible."¹ Mr. Baker then notices that in...