A Deconstructive Interpretation of The Old Man and the Sea

从解构主义浅析《老人与海》

The Old Man and the Sea has been hugely popular around the world since its publication. It marks Hemingway#8217;s masterpiece of fiction since 5.3 million copies of that issue were sold within two days. As mentioned in The Writer#8217;s Art of Self-defense, written by Jackson, Benson(2005), this work, cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in 1954, shows themes not only broadened but also optimistic. Its publisher, Scribner's, on an early dust jacket, called the novella a "new classic", and many critics favorably compared it with such works as William Faulkner's "The Bear" and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

Nevertheless, running from enthusiastic praise to severe criticism, people view The Old Man and the Sea from totally different sides according to different theories, which can be divided into construction and deconstruction.

Construction, or structuralism, is a belated term that describes a particular philosophical literary movement or moment. The term appeared in the works of French anthropologist Claude L#233;vi-Strauss and gave rise, in France, to the "structuralist movement." Influencing the thinking of writers such as Louis Althusser, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, as well as the structural Marxism of Nicos Poulantzas, most of whom disavowed themselves as being a part of this movement. The origins of structuralism connect with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure on linguistics, along with the linguistics of the Prague and Moscow schools.

In brief, de Saussure's structural linguistics propounded three related concepts. First, De Saussure argued for a distinction between langue (an idealized abstraction of language) and parole (language as actually used in daily life). He argued that the "sign" was composed of both a signified, an abstract concept or idea, and a "signifier", the perceived sound/visual image.Second, since different languages have different words to describe the same objects or concepts, there is no intrinsic reason why a specific sign is used to express a given signifier. It is thus "arbitrary". Third, signs thus gain their meaning from their relationships and contrasts with other signs. As he wrote, "in language, there are only differences without positive terms." Proponents of structuralism would argue that a specific domain of culture may be understood by means of a structure#8212;modeled on language#8212;that is distinct both from the organizations of reality and those of ideas or the imagination#8212;the "third order". In Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, for example, the structural order of "the Symbolic" is distinguished both from "the Real" and "the Imaginary". Similarly, in Althusser's Marxist theory, the structural order of the capitalist mode of production is distinct both from the actual, real agents involved in its relations and from the ideological forms in which those relations are understood.

Contrary to it, Jacques Derrida's 1967 work Of Grammatology introduced the majority of influential ideas within deconstruction. Deconstruction is a philosophy in the early days which due to France since the 1960s. By the philosopher Jacques Derrida, it was proposed based on critique to the structuralists of linguistics and become an advocate of contemporary western philosophical thought. To some extent, it is a critical outlook concerned with the relationship between the text and its meaning. Opinions mentioned in the famous book, Derrida onthe death penalty(2012), Derrida, who got inspirations from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, proposed that language as a system of signs and wordsonly has meaning because of the contrast between these signs. In the 1980s, the Postmodernism era, deconstruction was used in a range of theoretical enterprises in the humanities and social sciences, including law, anthropology, historiography, linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, feminism, and LGBT studies. As an important part of the post modern philosophy, deconstruction was finally formed in the United States. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man are representatives of the "Yale School" of deconstructive criticism. Therefore, deconstruction has become another important mode of criticism in the contemporary western area.

As mentioned in the famous book, The Cambridge Companion to Earnest Hemingway, when applying deconstruction into The Old Man and the Sea, it has totally different meanings, which can be divided into two sides. Academically, The Old Man and the Sea has been regarded as a classic with Santiago struggling against difficulties. Nevertheless, people can learn from the perspective of deconstruction Santiago is just a common old fisherman instead of a strong warrior, the sea can be destructive rather than idyllic and the ending is a failure not a success, which differ from traditional interpretations. Practically speaking, this study can not only activate people to penetrate into different authors#8217; works, which is typical of anti tradition, anti authority, anti rationalism and emphasizes on the freedom of language and thought, but also develop people#8217;s critical thinking of an image, the deep intentions of the author and the polarization of ideas within a work.

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