The Super Senior and the Text TOMATS blog 4

In The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway addresses two different readers. The first is the resistant reader who falls into the narrative audience of a fishing tale, perhaps another old fisherman listening over some beers on “the terrace,” accepting everything as true in . The resistant reader reads only for mimesis, empathizing with the old man’s decline and struggle to continue being a fisherman.

The second is the submissive reader who understands that the narrator is in fact the old man himself is is . The old man is the only witness to his adventures with the fish, therefore he is the only possible narrator. However, lying is part of the old man’s semic code as hyperbole is part of the fishing tale genre.