Abstract

The Old Man and the Sea, a novel mainly about the theme of the fighting spirit, is a masterpiece of Ernest Hemingway, an outstanding American writer of the 20th century. This thesis begins with a brief introduction to the author and this novel, and then analyzes the rich symbols adopted in this novel respectively in terms of the setting, the characters and the animals to explore the functions of symbolism in illustrating the characters’ mental activities, and thus discloses the theme of the great novel— the noble fighting spirit of the old man.

Key words: The Old Man and the Sea, symbolism, fighting spirit

摘要

《老人与海》是二十世纪美国杰出作家欧内斯特•海明威的一部以奋斗精神为题材的小说。本文从简要介绍作者生平和小说入手，进而分别从背景、人物和动物三个方面探讨小说中丰富的象征手法的运用，以此探究了象征主义在表现人物心理活动方面所起的作用, 从而揭示了小说的主题——老人高尚的奋斗精神。

关键词：《老人与海》；象征主义；奋斗精神

1.    Introduction
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is one of the greatest novelists in American literary history. He was one of the so-called “Lost Generation” in American literature. He wrote many novels, among which The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952) are the best known. He was born in Oak Park, Illinois. Before turning to fiction, he worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star and served as a First World War ambulance driver before enlisting with the Italian infantry and suffering a wound. After the war, he worked for the Toronto Star. During the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, he served as a newspaper correspondent, and then lived in Cuba until 1958 and Idaho until 1961, the year of his death by suicide. As a lifetime work of the best written work claimed by Hemingway himself, The Old Man and the Sea was first published in Life magazine in its issue of September 1, 1952. It got such an immediate success that it won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize and helped Hemingway win the 1954 Nobel Prize for literature.