Posted: June 2nd, 2015

Literary Response: The Old Man and the Sea

Narrate your experience and relate them to key themes in the literary work. It is your personal experiences that will form the basis of your paper, not a detailed literary explication. From your discussion your audience should be able to get a good idea what the work is about – the storyline, main characters, and theme. See student sample paper. Your paper should include a brief summary of the literary work and several direct quotes from it, but only to the extent that such quotes are connected to the life experience you are describing. Your paper should give ample evidence that you have read and understand the literary work and have found a way to make it relevant to your life. You want to give enough information about the literary work to demonstrate that you have read and understand it including at least four direct quotes with one or two long quotes (over 40 words, blocked without quotation marks). Imaging you are explaining the work to someone who has not read it, but please do not only give a book type report summary; it will be your vital connection that should form the substance of the essay. The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway (1952): ( www.classic-enotes.com)