SOURCE: "The Cuban Context of The Old Man and the Sea" in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, edited by Scott Donaldson, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 243-68.

In the following essay, Sylvester provides details about the Cuban cultural context of The Old Man and the Sea, as he argues that the novella is directed at readers who either know or want to know about the locale Hemingway describes, and asserts that historical specificity informs many of the novella's symbols.

In preparing a line-by-line, word-by-word scholarly commentary on The Old Man and the Sea, I discovered many aspects of the narrative thus far overlooked.¹ One pattern of neglected detail refers to workaday practicalities peculiar to the locale, and very often to local customs and habits of mind—to a general Cuban cultural consciousness. Here, as in many of his other works, Hemingway unobtrusively relies on such detail to account for...