Blog #6: The Old Man and the Sea

Why do we still read all of these books? Classics?! What makes a book a classic? Well that is one of the things that I think I struggle with in Honors English, knowing why we do the things that we do. Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, Lord of the Flies... Why? Well I actually think that The Old Man and the Sea was not that bad. I liked the fact that Ernest Hemingway did not add a bunch of extra pointless things that make the book like five hundred pages of nonsense.

I think that today's English teachers still make us read those "classics" because they teach a universal lesson. The lesson in this particular classic is to never give up even when you are against the odds or you think you are up against something that you cannot handle. This is a lesson that most people have already heard, but I think that all of the classic novels that we read for English class teach lessons that everybody has heard once or twice... or like twenty-five too many times. This really stumps me- What makes these books so special? I just do not get it.

The message is timeless because the lesson will live on forever. No matter how much things change in the future, if you give one hundred percent of your effort, more often than not you will be satisfied with the results. I am not really sure what makes the characters timeless, but if I had to give it a guess I would say that the protagonist, or the story's main character, is always memorable because they are seen as heroes. The heroes in the book are always the protagonist, and I think that they are the characters in the book that are most likely to be remembered.

So even though I do not completely understand why we are still forced to read the "classics," I do understand that the plot, the lesson, and the story's main characters are still remembered from books that were written over a century ago.