The Old Man and the Sea

Thursday. 31 October, 2019 - 1 min

There is always a bigger fish

I think that The Old Man and the Sea was the second book for which I made a braid and looked reasonable. I have come to love this book because its simple language and the relaxed thread that guides the story, which starkly contrasts with the tragedy that it contains.

Of course most of the interactions in this book are not face-to-face, so to say, but rather consist of the old man’s longings and worries. The small number of characters allows us to follow the evolution of the interactions from the beginning to the end, and see how the main actors swiftly shift. The boy, who is virtually the only one interacting with the old man in the first turn, is slowly replaced by the fish, which takes all of the old man’s attention until the sharks come into play. Eventually Manolin appears again and thus the heroes journey ends, apparently in the same place it started from but not quite so.

So long for this week’s braid. You can always find more at Literary Braid’s Twitter and Instagram.

Ismael Medina

Math and books and code

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