I recently finished The Old Man and the Sea. I came up with a couple different values that I believed the author had. You can tell a lot about Ernest Hemingway's values just from this book.
First, I thought about how he seemed to value the art of fishing. Fishing seemed to be in every aspect of the book. Going 84 days without catching a fish, the young man could no longer accompany the old man on fishing journeys. The old man had a fish on his line for three days and fought him until he captured him. For this struggle to happen, Hemingway must like fishing.
Second, Hemingway seems to value baseball. Baseball is always a topic to talk about with the old man. For example, he talks about baseball to keep him awake during his battle with the fish. It must really interest him if that's what gave him the strength to continue fighting with the fish.
Possibly the biggest value of all was his value of hard workers. The old fisherman went through some very hard struggles in his life. A reader might not even realize how hard fishing is until he reads this. It makes you respect fishermen a little more. Hemingway may value hard workers more than anything else.
Ernest Hemingway must have really valued workers, friends, and nature to write this passionately about it. The readers of this book learned a lot about the old man's dreams. Hemingway seems to write from the old man's perspective in the book. He also writes how things would look to an outside observer. But at the same time, he writes about the inner feelings and emotions of the old man. It is kind of mixed. You learned more through this perspective than you would from only a first person narrator. The way he wrote, you knew about his thoughts and the physical things around him. It was very easy to know more details this way, too. I actually prefer his way of writing.
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