Sometimes a Fish is Just a Fish
In a letter to art historian, Bernard Berenson, Ernest Hemingway once wrote with regard to his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Old Man and the Sea:
“…Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.”
Perhaps he was just in a mood that day but with those words, Papa Hem seemed to be admitting a universal truth: for the most part, writers write stories, whether from their imagination or from experience, to entertain or to reveal a truth. They are rarely planning for a white whale, say, to stand in for God or Fate or whatever. That exercise is better left for the reader to interpret.
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