Editing The Old Man and the Sea (section)

===Quality and accuracy===
Some literary critics find ''The Old Man and the Sea'' inferior to Hemingway's earlier works. [[Dwight Macdonald]] criticises the pseudo-archaic prose which pretends it is [[high culture]], but in reality is anything but.{{sfn|Macdonald|1960|pp=593, 596}} He compares the novella unfavourably with Hemingway's earlier works; he deplored ''The Old Man and the Sea'' as garrulous and repetitive when compared to the "disciplined, businesslike understatement" of [[The Undefeated (short story)|''The Undefeated'']], a short story Hemingway wrote in 1927.{{sfn|Macdonald|1960|pp=597–598}} Similarly, Brenner characterises the novella as riddled with amateurish mistakes in style and prose.{{sfn|Brenner|1991|pp=68–78}} Meyers criticises ''The Old Man and the Sea''{{'}}s melodrama, symbolism, and irony, concluding, like Macdonald, that "Hemingway either deceived himself about the profundity of his art" or expertly satisfied the desires of a pretentious audience.{{sfn|Meyers|1985|p=489}}

Robert Weeks notes that the novella abounds in factual impossibilities—he cites Santiago's near-[[clairvoyance]] in identifying fishes and judging weather patterns. Weeks maintains that Hemingway—previously criticized for his distaste for narrative invention—had instilled insincerity at the heart of his novel. He concluded that ''The Old Man and the Sea'' is "an inferior Hemingway novel."{{sfn|Weeks|1962|pp=188–192}} Bickford Sylvester comments that most of the errors Weeks outlined were based upon faults in then-current science, and some others were intended to nudge readers towards the work's subtext and deepest details.{{sfn|Sylvester|1996|pp=265–266}} Sylvester argues that seemingly-implausible narrative details in ''The Old Man and the Sea'' are actually hints. He cites the baseball conversation between Santiago and Manolin, which subtly indicates not only the precise dates of the novella's events (September 12–16, 1950) but also parallels the fisherman with his hero DiMaggio, also the son of a fisherman, who similarly resurged in performance during that week.{{sfn|Sylvester|1996|pp=246–249, 256–261}}