What Is Hemingway's View Of Life In A Shock Of Vision

“Life is so single mindedly awful it seems a conscious, cosmic prank; it starts in pain, is pervaded by painful imitation, dislocation, guilt, desire, fear of responsibility and isolation; and it is always bestial violence and death.” Richard Kasleany in The Shock of Vision sum up approximates Hemingway’s view of life, which is the theme for all his novels. Being a journalist in profession Hemingway had a firsthand experience of the World War I which made him realize the inevitability of death, from this realization Hemingway constituted his philosophy for life that brutality and disappointment are the larger part of the substance of life. In this harsh universe, pleasure and pain are interwoven and inseparable no matter what happens, life …show more content…
Even the sail of his skiff furled around the mast, all worn and patched “looked like the flag of permanent defeat.” Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same colour of the sea and were cheerful and undefeated. Like Conrad, Hemingway too had a personal experience of the sea. His journalistic spirit had given him a broader view of the World War-I as the collapse of modern values despair and exposure, which marked vulnerability of the sea, the old man is alone in the voyage accompanied only by his old age. He is abandoned by his fellow mariners, they thought him unlucky. At times the old man talks to himself or to a small bird on his skiff which shows how lonely he is in the midst of the sea, even he thinks of Mandolin when he had successfully killed the fish. Though he has been able to kill the fish and secure it in his skiff still he had no excitement which proves the vulnerability of his victory – it is vulnerable because he is with the sin of sincerity with which he can regard himself as his victim, thus sharing the strange affinity with the fish which he had caught. So later he calls the fish his