Key Facts
full title ·
The Old Man and the Sea
author · Ernest Hemingway
type of work · Novella
genre · Parable; tragedy
language · English
time and place written ·
1951,
Cuba
date of first publication ·
1952
publisher · Scribner’s
narrator · The novella is narrated by an anonymous
narrator.
point of view · Sometimes the narrator describes the
characters and events objectively, that is, as they would appear to an outside
observer. However, the narrator frequently provides details about Santiago’s
inner thoughts and dreams.
tone · Despite the narrator’s journalistic, matter-of-fact
tone, his reverence for Santiago and his struggle is apparent. The text affirms
its hero to a degree unusual even for Hemingway.
tense · Past
setting (time) · Late
1940s
setting (place) · A small fishing village near Havana,
Cuba; the waters of the Gulf of Mexico
protagonist · Santiago
major conflict · For three days, Santiago struggles against
the greatest fish of his long career.
rising action · After eighty-four successive days without
catching a fish, Santiago promises his former assistant, Manolin, that he will
go “far out” into the ocean. The marlin takes the bait, but Santiago is unable
to reel him in, which leads to a three-day struggle between the fisherman and
the fish.
climax · The marlin circles the skiff while Santiago slowly
reels him in. Santiago nearly passes out from exhaustion but gathers enough
strength to harpoon the marlin through the heart, causing him to lurch in an
almost sexual climax of vitality before dying.
falling action · Santiago sails back to shore with the
marlin tied to his boat. Sharks follow the marlin’s trail of blood and destroy
it. Santiago arrives home toting only the fish’s skeletal carcass. The village
fishermen respect their formerly ridiculed peer, and Manolin pledges to return
to fishing with Santiago. Santiago falls into a deep sleep and dreams of lions.
themes · The honor in struggle, defeat, and death; pride as
the source of greatness and determination
motifs · Crucifixion imagery; life from death; the lions on
the beach
symbols · The marlin; the shovel-nosed sharks
foreshadowing · Santiago’s insistence that he will sail out
farther than ever before foreshadows his destruction; because the marlin is
linked to Santiago, the marlin’s death foreshadows Santiago’s own destruction
by the sharks.
Context
Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak
Park, Illinois, in 1899, the son of a doctor and a music teacher. He began his
writing career as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. At age eighteen,
he volunteered to serve as a Red Cross ambulance driver in World War I and was
sent to Italy, where he was badly injured by shrapnel. Hemingway later
fictionalized his experience in Italy in what some consider his greatest novel,
A Farewell to Arms. In 1921, Hemingway moved to Paris, where he served
as a correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star. In Paris, he fell in with
a group of American and English expatriate writers that included F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Ford Madox Ford. In the early
1920s, Hemingway began to achieve fame as a chronicler of the disaffection felt
by many American youth after World War I—a generation of youth whom Stein
memorably dubbed the “Lost Generation.” His novels The Sun Also Rises
(1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) established him as a dominant
literary voice of his time. His spare, charged style of writing was
revolutionary at the time and would be imitated, for better or for worse, by
generations of young writers to come.
After leaving Paris, Hemingway wrote
on bullfighting, published short stories and articles, covered the Spanish
Civil War as a journalist, and published his best-selling novel, For Whom
the Bell Tolls (1940). These pieces helped Hemingway build up the mythic
breed of masculinity for which he wished to be known. His work and his life
revolved around big-game hunting, fishing, boxing, and bullfighting, endeavors
that he tried to master as seriously as he did writing. In the 1930s, Hemingway
lived in Key West, Florida, and later in Cuba, and his years of experience
fishing the Gulf Stream and the Caribbean provided an essential background for
the vivid descriptions of the fisherman’s craft in The Old Man and the Sea.
In 1936, he wrote a piece for Esquire about a Cuban fisherman who was
dragged out to sea by a great marlin, a game fish that typically weighs hundreds
of pounds. Sharks had destroyed the fisherman’s catch by the time he was found
half-delirious by other fishermen. This story seems an obvious seed for the
tale of Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea.
A great fan of baseball, Hemingway
liked to talk in the sport’s lingo, and by 1952, he badly “needed a win.” His
novel Across the River and Into the Trees, published in 1950, was a
disaster. It was his first novel in ten years, and he had claimed to friends
that it was his best yet. Critics, however, disagreed and called the work the
worst thing Hemingway had ever written. Many readers claimed it read like a
parody of Hemingway. The control and precision of his earlier prose seemed to
be lost beyond recovery.
The huge success of The Old Man
and the Sea, published in 1952, was a much-needed vindication. The novella
won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it likely cinched the Nobel Prize
for Hemingway in 1954, as it was cited for particular recognition by the Nobel
Academy. It was the last novel published in his lifetime.
Although the novella helped to
regenerate Hemingway’s wilting career, it has since been met by divided
critical opinion. While some critics have praised The Old Man and the Sea
as a new classic that takes its place among such established American works as
William Faulkner’s short story “The Bear” and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick,
others have attacked the story as “imitation Hemingway” and find fault with the
author’s departure from the uncompromising realism with which he made his name.
Because Hemingway was a writer who
always relied heavily on autobiographical sources, some critics, not
surprisingly, eventually decided that the novella served as a thinly veiled
attack upon them. According to this reading, Hemingway was the old master at
the end of his career being torn apart by—but ultimately triumphing
over—critics on a feeding frenzy. But this reading ultimately reduces The
Old Man and the Sea to little more than an act of literary revenge. The
more compelling interpretation asserts that the novella is a parable about life
itself, in particular man’s struggle for triumph in a world that seems designed
to destroy him.
Despite the soberly life-affirming
tone of the novella, Hemingway was, at the end of his life, more and more prone
to debilitating bouts of depression. He committed suicide in 1961 in Ketchum,
Idaho.
Plot Overview
The Old Man and the Sea is the story of an epic struggle between an
old, seasoned fisherman and the greatest catch of his life. For eighty-four
days, Santiago, an aged Cuban fisherman, has set out to sea and returned
empty-handed. So conspicuously unlucky is he that the parents of his young,
devoted apprentice and friend, Manolin, have forced the boy to leave the old
man in order to fish in a more prosperous boat. Nevertheless, the boy continues
to care for the old man upon his return each night. He helps the old man tote
his gear to his ramshackle hut, secures food for him, and discusses the latest
developments in American baseball, especially the trials of the old man’s hero,
Joe DiMaggio. Santiago is confident that his unproductive streak will soon come
to an end, and he resolves to sail out farther than usual the following day.
On the eighty-fifth day of his unlucky streak, Santiago does as promised,
sailing his skiff far beyond the island’s shallow coastal waters and venturing
into the Gulf Stream. He prepares his lines and drops them. At noon, a big
fish, which he knows is a marlin, takes the bait that Santiago has placed one
hundred fathoms deep in the waters. The old man expertly hooks the fish, but he
cannot pull it in. Instead, the fish begins to pull the boat.
Unable to tie the line fast to the boat for fear the fish would snap a taut
line, the old man bears the strain of the line with his shoulders, back, and
hands, ready to give slack should the marlin make a run. The fish pulls the
boat all through the day, through the night, through another day, and through
another night. It swims steadily northwest until at last it tires and swims
east with the current. The entire time, Santiago endures constant pain from the
fishing line. Whenever the fish lunges, leaps, or makes a dash for freedom, the
cord cuts Santiago badly. Although wounded and weary, the old man feels a deep
empathy and admiration for the marlin, his brother in suffering, strength, and
resolve.
On the third day the fish tires, and Santiago, sleep-deprived, aching, and
nearly delirious, manages to pull the marlin in close enough to kill it with a
harpoon thrust. Dead beside the skiff, the marlin is the largest Santiago has
ever seen. He lashes it to his boat, raises the small mast, and sets sail for
home. While Santiago is excited by the price that the marlin will bring at
market, he is more concerned that the people who will eat the fish are unworthy
of its greatness.
As Santiago sails on with the fish, the marlin’s blood leaves a trail in the
water and attracts sharks. The first to attack is a great mako shark, which
Santiago manages to slay with the harpoon. In the struggle, the old man loses
the harpoon and lengths of valuable rope, which leaves him vulnerable to other
shark attacks. The old man fights off the successive vicious predators as best
he can, stabbing at them with a crude spear he makes by lashing a knife to an
oar, and even clubbing them with the boat’s tiller. Although he kills several
sharks, more and more appear, and by the time night falls, Santiago’s continued
fight against the scavengers is useless. They devour the marlin’s precious
meat, leaving only skeleton, head, and tail. Santiago chastises himself for
going “out too far,” and for sacrificing his great and worthy opponent. He
arrives home before daybreak, stumbles back to his shack, and sleeps very
deeply.
The next morning, a crowd of amazed fishermen gathers around the skeletal
carcass of the fish, which is still lashed to the boat. Knowing nothing of the
old man’s struggle, tourists at a nearby café observe the remains of the giant
marlin and mistake it for a shark. Manolin, who has been worried sick over the
old man’s absence, is moved to tears when he finds Santiago safe in his bed.
The boy fetches the old man some coffee and the daily papers with the baseball
scores, and watches him sleep. When the old man wakes, the two agree to fish as
partners once more. The old man returns to sleep and dreams his usual dream of
lions at play on the beaches of Africa.
Character
List
Santiago - The old man of the novella’s title, Santiago
is a Cuban fisherman who has had an extended run of bad luck. Despite his
expertise, he has been unable to catch a fish for eighty-four days. He is
humble, yet exhibits a justified pride in his abilities. His knowledge of the
sea and its creatures, and of his craft, is unparalleled and helps him preserve
a sense of hope regardless of circumstance. Throughout his life, Santiago has
been presented with contests to test his strength and endurance. The marlin
with which he struggles for three days represents his greatest challenge.
Paradoxically, although Santiago ultimately loses the fish, the marlin is also
his greatest victory.
The marlin - Santiago hooks the marlin, which we learn at
the end of the novella measures eighteen feet, on the first afternoon of his
fishing expedition. Because of the marlin’s great size, Santiago is unable to
pull the fish in, and the two become engaged in a kind of tug-of-war that often
seems more like an alliance than a struggle. The fishing line serves as a
symbol of the fraternal connection Santiago feels with the fish. When the
captured marlin is later destroyed by sharks, Santiago feels destroyed as well.
Like Santiago, the marlin is implicitly compared to Christ.
Manolin - A boy presumably in his adolescence, Manolin
is Santiago’s apprentice and devoted attendant. The old man first took him out
on a boat when he was merely five years old. Due to Santiago’s recent bad luck,
Manolin’s parents have forced the boy to go out on a different fishing boat.
Manolin, however, still cares deeply for the old man, to whom he continues to
look as a mentor. His love for Santiago is unmistakable as the two discuss baseball
and as the young boy recruits help from villagers to improve the old man’s
impoverished conditions.
Santiago
Santiago suffers terribly throughout
The Old Man and the Sea. In the
opening pages of the book, he has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish
and has become the laughingstock of his small village. He then endures a long
and grueling struggle with the marlin only to see his trophy catch destroyed by
sharks. Yet, the destruction enables the old man to undergo a remarkable
transformation, and he wrests triumph and renewed life from his seeming defeat.
After all, Santiago is an old man whose physical existence is almost over, but
the reader is assured that Santiago will persist through Manolin, who, like a
disciple, awaits the old man’s teachings and will make use of those lessons
long after his teacher has died. Thus, Santiago manages, perhaps, the most
miraculous feat of all: he finds a way to prolong his life after death.
Santiago’s commitment to sailing out farther than any fisherman has before,
to where the big fish promise to be, testifies to the depth of his pride. Yet,
it also shows his determination to change his luck. Later, after the sharks
have destroyed his prize marlin, Santiago chastises himself for his hubris
(exaggerated pride), claiming that it has ruined both the marlin and himself.
True as this might be, it is only half the picture, for Santiago’s pride also
enables him to achieve his most true and complete self. Furthermore, it helps
him earn the deeper respect of the village fishermen and secures him the prized
companionship of the boy—he knows that he will never have to endure such an
epic struggle again.
Santiago’s pride is what enables him to endure, and it is perhaps endurance
that matters most in Hemingway’s conception of the world—a world in which death
and destruction, as part of the natural order of things, are unavoidable.
Hemingway seems to believe that there are only two options: defeat or endurance
until destruction; Santiago clearly chooses the latter. His stoic determination
is mythic, nearly Christ-like in proportion. For three days, he holds fast to
the line that links him to the fish, even though it cuts deeply into his palms,
causes a crippling cramp in his left hand, and ruins his back. This physical
pain allows Santiago to forge a connection with the marlin that goes beyond the
literal link of the line: his bodily aches attest to the fact that he is well
matched, that the fish is a worthy opponent, and that he himself, because he is
able to fight so hard, is a worthy fisherman. This connectedness to the world
around him eventually elevates Santiago beyond what would otherwise be his
defeat. Like Christ, to whom Santiago is unashamedly compared at the end of the
novella, the old man’s physical suffering leads to a more significant spiritual
triumph.
Manolin
Manolin is present only in the beginning and at the end of
The Old Man
and the Sea, but his presence is important because Manolin’s devotion to
Santiago highlights Santiago’s value as a person and as a fisherman. Manolin
demonstrates his love for Santiago openly. He makes sure that the old man has
food, blankets, and can rest without being bothered. Despite Hemingway’s
insistence that his characters were a real old man and a real boy, Manolin’s
purity and singleness of purpose elevate him to the level of a symbolic
character. Manolin’s actions are not tainted by the confusion, ambivalence, or
willfulness that typify adolescence. Instead, he is a companion who feels
nothing but love and devotion.
Hemingway does hint at the boy’s resentment for his father, whose wishes
Manolin obeys by abandoning the old man after forty days without catching a
fish. This fact helps to establish the boy as a real human being—a person with
conflicted loyalties who faces difficult decisions. By the end of the book,
however, the boy abandons his duty to his father, swearing that he will sail
with the old man regardless of the consequences. He stands, in the novella’s
final pages, as a symbol of uncompromised love and fidelity. As the old man’s
apprentice, he also represents the life that will follow from death. His
dedication to learning from the old man ensures that Santiago will live on.
Joe DiMaggio - Although DiMaggio never appears in the novel,
he plays a significant role nonetheless. Santiago worships him as a model of
strength and commitment, and his thoughts turn toward DiMaggio whenever he
needs to reassure himself of his own strength. Despite a painful bone spur that
might have crippled another player, DiMaggio went on to secure a triumphant
career. He was a center fielder for the New York Yankees from 1936 to 1951, and
is often considered the best all-around player ever at that position.
Perico - Perico, the reader assumes, owns the bodega in
Santiago’s village. He never appears in the novel, but he serves an important
role in the fisherman’s life by providing him with newspapers that report the
baseball scores. This act establishes him as a kind man who helps the aging
Santiago.
Martin - Like Perico, Martin, a café owner in
Santiago’s village, does not appear in the story. The reader learns of him
through Manolin, who often goes to Martin for Santiago’s supper. As the old man
says, Martin is a man of frequent kindness who deserves to be repaid.
Themes, Motifs & Symbols
Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
The Honor in Struggle, Defeat & Death
From the very first paragraph, Santiago is characterized as someone
struggling against defeat. He has gone eighty-four days without catching a
fish—he will soon pass his own record of eighty-seven days. Almost as a
reminder of Santiago’s struggle, the sail of his skiff resembles “the flag of
permanent defeat.” But the old man refuses defeat at every turn: he resolves to
sail out beyond the other fishermen to where the biggest fish promise to be. He
lands the marlin, tying his record of eighty-seven days after a brutal
three-day fight, and he continues to ward off sharks from stealing his prey,
even though he knows the battle is useless.
Because Santiago is pitted against the creatures of the sea, some readers
choose to view the tale as a chronicle of man’s battle
against the
natural world, but the novella is, more accurately, the story of man’s place
within
nature. Both Santiago and the marlin display qualities of pride, honor, and
bravery, and both are subject to the same eternal law: they must kill or be
killed. As Santiago reflects when he watches the weary warbler fly toward
shore, where it will inevitably meet the hawk, the world is filled with
predators, and no living thing can escape the inevitable struggle that will
lead to its death. Santiago lives according to his own observation: “man is not
made for defeat . . . [a] man can be destroyed but not defeated.” In
Hemingway’s portrait of the world, death is inevitable, but the best men (and
animals) will nonetheless refuse to give in to its power. Accordingly, man and
fish will struggle to the death, just as hungry sharks will lay waste to an old
man’s trophy catch.
The novel suggests that it is possible to transcend this natural law. In
fact, the very inevitability of destruction creates the terms that allow a
worthy man or beast to transcend it. It is precisely through the effort to
battle the inevitable that a man can prove himself. Indeed, a man can prove
this determination over and over through the worthiness of the opponents he chooses
to face. Santiago finds the marlin worthy of a fight, just as he once found
“the great negro of Cienfuegos” worthy. His admiration for these opponents
brings love and respect into an equation with death, as their destruction
becomes a point of honor and bravery that confirms Santiago’s heroic qualities.
One might characterize the equation as the working out of the statement
“Because I love you, I have to kill you.” Alternately, one might draw a
parallel to the poet John Keats and his insistence that beauty can only be
comprehended in the moment before death, as beauty bows to destruction.
Santiago, though destroyed at the end of the novella, is never defeated.
Instead, he emerges as a hero. Santiago’s struggle does not enable him to
change man’s place in the world. Rather, it enables him to meet his most
dignified destiny.
Pride as the Source of Greatness & Determination
Many parallels exist between Santiago and the classic heroes of the ancient
world. In addition to exhibiting terrific strength, bravery, and moral
certainty, those heroes usually possess a tragic flaw—a quality that, though
admirable, leads to their eventual downfall. If pride is Santiago’s fatal flaw,
he is keenly aware of it. After sharks have destroyed the marlin, the old man
apologizes again and again to his worthy opponent. He has ruined them both, he
concedes, by sailing beyond the usual boundaries of fishermen. Indeed, his last
word on the subject comes when he asks himself the reason for his undoing and
decides, “Nothing . . . I went out too far.”
While it is certainly true that Santiago’s eighty-four-day run of bad luck
is an affront to his pride as a masterful fisherman, and that his attempt to
bear out his skills by sailing far into the gulf waters leads to disaster,
Hemingway does not condemn his protagonist for being full of pride. On the
contrary, Santiago stands as proof that pride motivates men to greatness.
Because the old man acknowledges that he killed the mighty marlin largely out
of pride, and because his capture of the marlin leads in turn to his heroic
transcendence of defeat, pride becomes the source of Santiago’s greatest
strength. Without a ferocious sense of pride, that battle would never have been
fought, or more likely, it would have been abandoned before the end.
Santiago’s pride also motivates his desire to transcend the destructive
forces of nature. Throughout the novel, no matter how baleful his circumstances
become, the old man exhibits an unflagging determination to catch the marlin
and bring it to shore. When the first shark arrives, Santiago’s resolve is
mentioned twice in the space of just a few paragraphs. First we are told that
the old man “was full of resolution but he had little hope.” Then, sentences
later, the narrator says, “He hit [the shark] without hope but with
resolution.” The old man meets every challenge with the same unwavering
determination: he is willing to die in order to bring in the marlin, and he is
willing to die in order to battle the feeding sharks. It is this conscious
decision to act, to fight, to never give up that enables Santiago to avoid
defeat. Although he returns to Havana without the trophy of his long battle, he
returns with the knowledge that he has acquitted himself proudly and manfully.
Hemingway seems to suggest that victory is not a prerequisite for honor.
Instead, glory depends upon one having the pride to see a struggle through to
its end, regardless of the outcome. Even if the old man had returned with the
marlin intact, his moment of glory, like the marlin’s meat, would have been
short-lived. The glory and honor Santiago accrues comes not from his battle
itself but from his pride and determination to fight.
Motifs
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Crucifixion Imagery
In order to suggest the profundity of the old man’s sacrifice and the glory
that derives from it, Hemingway purposefully likens Santiago to Christ, who,
according to Christian theology, gave his life for the greater glory of
humankind. Crucifixion imagery is the most noticeable way in which Hemingway
creates the symbolic parallel between Santiago and Christ. When Santiago’s
palms are first cut by his fishing line, the reader cannot help but think of
Christ suffering his stigmata. Later, when the sharks arrive, Hemingway
portrays the old man as a crucified martyr, saying that he makes a noise
similar to that of a man having nails driven through his hands. Furthermore,
the image of the old man struggling up the hill with his mast across his
shoulders recalls Christ’s march toward Calvary. Even the position in which
Santiago collapses on his bed—face down with his arms out straight and the
palms of his hands up—brings to mind the image of Christ suffering on the
cross. Hemingway employs these images in the final pages of the novella in
order to link Santiago to Christ, who exemplified transcendence by turning loss
into gain, defeat into triumph, and even death into renewed life.
Life from Death
Death is the unavoidable force in the novella, the one fact that no living
creature can escape. But death, Hemingway suggests, is never an end in itself:
in death there is always the possibility of the most vigorous life. The reader
notes that as Santiago slays the marlin, not only is the old man reinvigorated
by the battle, but the fish also comes alive “with his death in him.” Life, the
possibility of renewal, necessarily follows on the heels of death.
Whereas the marlin’s death hints at a type of physical reanimation, death
leads to life in less literal ways at other points in the novella. The book’s
crucifixion imagery emphasizes the cyclical connection between life and death,
as does Santiago’s battle with the marlin. His success at bringing the marlin
in earns him the awed respect of the fishermen who once mocked him, and secures
him the companionship of Manolin, the apprentice who will carry on Santiago’s
teachings long after the old man has died.
The Lions on the Beach
Santiago dreams his pleasant dream of the lions at play on the beaches of
Africa three times. The first time is the night before he departs on his
three-day fishing expedition, the second occurs when he sleeps on the boat for
a few hours in the middle of his struggle with the marlin, and the third takes
place at the very end of the book. In fact, the sober promise of the triumph
and regeneration with which the novella closes is supported by the final image
of the lions. Because Santiago associates the lions with his youth, the dream
suggests the circular nature of life. Additionally, because Santiago imagines
the lions, fierce predators, playing, his dream suggests a harmony between the
opposing forces—life and death, love and hate, destruction and regeneration—of
nature.
Symbols
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to
represent abstract ideas or concepts.
The Marlin
Magnificent and glorious, the marlin symbolizes the ideal opponent. In a
world in which “everything kills everything else in some way,” Santiago feels
genuinely lucky to find himself matched against a creature that brings out the
best in him: his strength, courage, love, and respect.
The Shovel-Nosed Sharks
The shovel-nosed sharks are little more than moving appetites that
thoughtlessly and gracelessly attack the marlin. As opponents of the old man,
they stand in bold contrast to the marlin, which is worthy of Santiago’s effort
and strength. They symbolize and embody the destructive laws of the universe
and attest to the fact that those laws can be transcended only when equals
fight to the death. Because they are base predators, Santiago wins no glory
from battling them.
Day One
From Santiago’s return from the eighty-fourth consecutive
day without catching a fish to his dreams of lions on the beach
Summary
He only dreamed of places now and of the lions on the beach. They played
like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy.
Santiago, an old fisherman, has gone eighty-four days without catching a
fish. For the first forty days, a boy named Manolin had fished with him, but
Manolin’s parents, who call Santiago
salao, or “the worst form of
unlucky,” forced Manolin to leave him in order to work in a more prosperous
boat. The old man is wrinkled, splotched, and scarred from handling heavy fish
on cords, but his eyes, which are the color of the sea, remain “cheerful and
undefeated.”
Having made some money with the successful fishermen, the boy offers to
return to Santiago’s skiff, reminding him of their previous eighty-seven-day
run of bad luck, which culminated in their catching big fish every day for
three weeks. He talks with the old man as they haul in Santiago’s fishing gear
and laments that he was forced to obey his father, who lacks faith and, as a
result, made him switch boats. The pair stops for a beer at a terrace café,
where fishermen make fun of Santiago. The old man does not mind. Santiago and
Manolin reminisce about the many years the two of them fished together, and the
boy begs the old man to let him provide fresh bait fish for him. The old man
accepts the gift with humility. Santiago announces his plans to go “far out” in
the sea the following day.
Manolin and Santiago haul the gear to the old man’s shack, which is
furnished with nothing more than the barest necessities: a bed, a table and
chair, and a place to cook. On the wall are two pictures: one of the Sacred
Heart of Jesus and one of the Virgin of Cobre, the patroness of Cuba. The old
man has taken down the photograph of his wife, which made him feel “too
lonely.” The two go through their usual dinner ritual, in which the boy asks
Santiago what he is going to eat, and the old man replies, “yellow rice with
fish,” and then offers some to the boy. The boy declines, and his offer to
start the old man’s fire is rejected. In reality, there is no food.
Excited to read the baseball scores, Santiago pulls out a newspaper, which
he says was given to him by Perico at the bodega. Manolin goes to get the bait fish
and returns with some dinner as well, a gift from Martin, the café owner. The
old man is moved by Martin’s thoughtfulness and promises to repay the kindness.
Manolin and Santiago discuss baseball. Santiago is a huge admirer of “the great
DiMaggio,” whose father was a fisherman. After discussing with Santiago the
greatest ballplayers and the greatest baseball managers, the boy declares that
Santiago is the greatest fisherman: “There are many good fishermen and some
great ones. But there is only you.” Finally, the boy leaves, and the old man
goes to sleep. He dreams his sweet, recurring dream, of lions playing on the
white beaches of Africa, a scene he saw from his ship when he was a very young
man.
Analysis
The opening pages of the book establish Santiago’s character and set the
scene for the action to follow. Even though he loves Manolin and is loved
dearly by the boy, the old man lives as an outsider. The greeting he receives
from the fishermen, most of whom mock him for his fruitless voyages to sea, shows
Santiago to be an alienated, almost ostracized figure. Such an alienated
position is characteristic of Hemingway’s heroes, whose greatest achievements
depend, in large part, upon their isolation. In Hemingway’s works, it is only
once a man is removed from the numbing and false confines of modern society
that he can confront the larger, universal truths that govern him. In
A
Farewell to Arms, for instance, only after Frederic Henry abandons his post
in the army and lives in seclusion is he able to learn the dismal lesson that
death renders meaningless such notions as honor, glory, and love. Yet, although
Hemingway’s message in
The Old Man and the Sea is tragic in many
respects, the story of Santiago and the destruction of his greatest catch is
far from dismal. Unlike Frederic, Santiago is not defeated by his
enlightenment. The narrator emphasizes Santiago’s perseverance in the opening
pages, mentioning that the old man’s eyes are still “cheerful and undefeated”
after suffering nearly three months without a single catch. And, although
Santiago’s struggle will bring about defeat—the great marlin will be devoured
by sharks—Santiago will emerge as a victor. As he tells the boy, in order for
this to happen, he must venture far out, farther than the other fishermen are
willing to go.
In Hemingway’s narrative, Santiago is elevated above the normal stature of a
protagonist, assuming near-mythical proportions. He belongs to a tradition of
literary heroes whose superior qualities necessitate their distance from ordinary
humans and endeavors. Because Manolin constantly expresses his devotion to,
reverence for, and trust of Santiago, he establishes his mentor as a figure of
significant moral and professional stature, despite the difficulties of the
past eighty-four days. While other young fishermen make fun of the old man,
Manolin knows Santiago’s true worth and the extent of Santiago’s knowledge. In
the old man, Hemingway provides the reader with a model of good, simple living:
Santiago transcends the evils of the world—hunger, poverty, the contempt of his
fellow men—by enduring them.
In these first few scenes, Hemingway introduces several issues and images
that will recur throughout the book. The first is the question of Santiago’s
endurance. The descriptions of his crude hut, almost nonexistent eating habits,
and emaciated body force the reader to question the old man’s physical
capacities. How could Santiago, who subsists on occasional handouts from kind
café owners or, worse, imaginary meals, wage the terrific battle with the great
marlin that the novel recounts? As the book progresses, we see that the
question is irrelevant. Although Santiago’s battle is played out in physical
terms, the stakes are decidedly spiritual.
This section also introduces two important symbols: the lions playing on the
beaches of Africa and baseball’s immortal Joe DiMaggio. Throughout his trial at
sea, Santiago’s thoughts will return to DiMaggio, for to him the baseball
player represents a kind of triumphant survival. After suffering a bone spur in
his heel, DiMaggio returned to baseball to become, in the eyes of many, the
greatest player of all time. The lions are a more enigmatic symbol. The
narrator says that they are Santiago’s only remaining dream. When he sleeps, he
no longer envisions storms or women or fish, but only the “young cats in the
dusk,” which “he love[s] . . . as he love[s] the boy.” Because the image of the
lions has stayed with Santiago since his boyhood, the lions connect the end of
the old man’s life with the beginning, giving his existence a kind of
circularity. Like Santiago, the lions are hunters at the core of their being.
The fact that Santiago dreams of the lions at play rather than on the hunt
indicates that his dream is a break—albeit a temporary one—from the vicious
order of the natural world.
Day Two
From Santiago waking Manolin at the start of the
eighty-fifth day since Santiago has caught a fish to Santiago’s promise to kill
the marlin before the day ends
Summary
The old man hit him on the head for kindness and kicked him, his body still
shuddering, under the shade of the stern.
The next morning, before sunrise, the old man goes to Manolin’s house to
wake the boy. The two head back to Santiago’s shack, carry the old man’s gear
to his boat, and drink coffee from condensed milk cans. Santiago has slept well
and is confident about the day’s prospects. He and Manolin part on the beach,
wishing each other good luck.
The old man rows steadily away from shore, toward the deep waters of the
Gulf Stream. He hears the leaps and whirs of the flying fish, which he
considers to be his friends, and thinks with sympathy of the small, frail birds
that try to catch them. He loves the sea, though at times it can be cruel. He
thinks of the sea as a woman whose wild behavior is beyond her control. The old
man drops his baited fishing lines to various measured depths and rows expertly
to keep them from drifting with the current. Above all else, he is precise.
The sun comes up. Santiago continues to move away from shore, observing his
world as he drifts along. He sees flying fish pursued by dolphins; a diving,
circling seabird; Sargasso weed, a type of seaweed found in the Gulf Stream;
the distasteful purple Portuguese man-of-war; and the small fish that swim
among the jellyfish-like creatures’ filaments. Rowing farther and farther out,
Santiago follows the seabird that is hunting for fish, using it as a guide.
Soon, one of the old man’s lines goes taut. He pulls up a ten-pound tuna,
which, he says out loud, will make a lovely piece of bait. He wonders when he
developed the habit of talking to himself but does not remember. He thinks that
if the other fishermen heard him talking, they would think him crazy, although
he knows he isn’t. Eventually, the old man realizes that he has sailed so far
out that he can no longer see the green of the shore.
When the projecting stick that marks the top of the hundred-fathom line dips
sharply, Santiago is sure that the fish tugging on the line is of a
considerable size, and he prays that it will take the bait. The marlin plays
with the bait for a while, and when it does finally take the bait, it starts to
move with it, pulling the boat. The old man gives a mighty pull, then another,
but he gains nothing. The fish drags the skiff farther into the sea. No land at
all is visible to Santiago now.
All day the fish pulls the boat as the old man braces the line with his back
and holds it taut in his hands, ready to give more line if necessary. The
struggle goes on all night, as the fish continues to pull the boat. The glow
given off by the lights of Havana gradually fades, signifying that the boat is
the farthest from shore it has been so far. Over and over, the old man wishes
he had the boy with him. When he sees two porpoises playing in the water,
Santiago begins to pity his quarry and consider it a brother. He thinks back to
the time that he caught one of a pair of marlin: the male fish let the female
take the bait, then he stayed by the boat, as though in mourning. Although the
memory makes him sad, Santiago’s determination is unchecked: as the marlin
swims out, the old man goes “beyond all people in the world” to find him.
The sun rises and the fish has not tired, though it is now swimming in
shallower waters. The old man cannot increase the tension on the line, because
if it is too taut it will break and the fish will get away. Also, if the hook
makes too big a cut in the fish, the fish may get away from it. Santiago hopes
that the fish will jump, because its air sacs would fill and prevent the fish
from going too deep into the water, which would make it easier to pull out. A
yellow weed attaches to the line, helping to slow the fish. Santiago can do
nothing but hold on. He pledges his love and respect to the fish, but he
nevertheless promises that he will kill his opponent before the day ends.
Analysis
As Santiago sets out on the eighty-fifth day, the reader witnesses the
qualities that earn him Manolin’s praise and dedication. The old man is an
expert seaman, able to read the sea, sky, and their respective creatures like
books that tell him what he needs to know. The flying fish, for instance,
signal the arrival of dolphins, while, in Santiago’s experience, the
magnificent tug on the line can mean only one thing: a marlin—a type of large
game fish that weighs hundreds of pounds. Unlike the fishermen he passes on his
way into the deep waters of the gulf, Santiago exercises an unparalleled
precision when fishing. He keeps his lines perfectly straight instead of
letting them drift as the other fishermen do, which means that he always knows
exactly how deep they are. Santiago’s focus, his strength and resolve in the
face of tremendous obstacles, as well as the sheer artistry with which he
executes his tasks, mark him as a hero.
Santiago conforms to the model of the classical hero in two important
respects. First, he displays a rare determination to understand the universe,
as is evident when he meditates that the sea is beautiful and benevolent, but
also so cruel that the birds who rely on the sea’s bounty are too delicate for
it. Second, the old man possesses a tragic flaw that will lead to his downfall:
pride. Santiago’s pride carries him far, not only metaphorically but
literally—beyond his fellow fishermen into beautiful but, in the end, terribly
cruel waters. As in classical epics, the most important struggle in Hemingway’s
novella is a moral one. The fish itself is of secondary importance, for it is merely
a trophy, a material prize.
Some critics have taken issue with Hemingway’s depiction of the old man
because it betrays the very tenets of fiction that the author demanded (see
“Hemingway’s Style”). Hemingway was, first and foremost, a proponent of realism.
He wished to strip literature of its pretense and ornamentation, and he built a
reputation as a journalistic writer who prized hard facts above all else.
Metaphysical meditations and lofty philosophizing held little interest for
Hemingway when compared to the details of daily life. As he states in
A
Farewell to Arms, “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow
were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the
names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.” But several critics
have charged Hemingway with a failure to render his old man or, for that
matter, the sea realistically. Hemingway has forged particular details that
simply are not true. For example, as critic Robert P. Weeks points out, the poisonous
Portuguese man-of-war that follows Santiago’s boat would not appear in the
waters off of Cuba for another six months. A more significant, less petty
objection is the charge that Hemingway reduces Santiago to an unrealistic
archetype of goodness and purity, while the surrounding world is marked by
man’s romance and brotherhood with the sea and its many creatures.
Many critics believe that Hemingway was striking out into new literary
territory with
The Old Man and the Sea. America’s foremost proponent of
realism seemed to be moving toward something as highly symbolic as parable.
Hemingway, however, disagreed. The philosophy that governed his writing of the
novella was the same one that shaped his earlier novels. In a
1958 interview with
The Paris Review, Hemingway
spoke about
The Old Man and the Sea:
Anyway, to skip how [the writing] is done, I had
unbelievable luck this time and could convey the [old man’s] experience
completely and have it be one that no one had ever conveyed. The luck was that
I had a good man and a good boy and lately writers have forgotten there are
still such things.
To Hemingway, Santiago and Manolin were as true to the real world as
protagonists like Frederic Henry of
A Farewell to Arms or Jake Barnes of
The Sun Also Rises.
The old man’s memory of hooking the female marlin of a male-female pair
exemplifies Hemingway’s vision of a world in which women have no real
place—even the picture of Santiago’s wife no longer remains on his wall. Men
are the central focus of most of Hemingway’s writing and certainly of
The
Old Man and the Sea. It is no coincidence that Santiago is convinced that
his greatest adversary is, as he continually notes, a male, a fact that he
could not possibly ascertain before even seeing the fish.
Day Three
From Santiago’s encounter with the weary warbler to his
decision to rest after contemplating the night sky
Summary
I do not understand these things, he thought. But it is good that we do not
have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on
the sea and kill our true brothers.
A small, tired warbler (a type of bird) lands on the stern of the skiff,
flutters around Santiago’s head, then perches on the taut fishing line that
links the old man to the big fish. The old man suspects that it is the
warbler’s first trip, and that it knows nothing of the hawks that will meet the
warbler as it nears land. Knowing that the warbler cannot understand him, the
old man tells the bird to stay and rest up before heading toward shore. Just
then the marlin surges, nearly pulling Santiago overboard, and the bird
departs. Santiago notices that his hand is bleeding from where the line has cut
it.
Aware that he will need to keep his strength, the old man makes himself eat
the tuna he caught the day before, which he had expected to use as bait. While
he cuts and eats the fish with his right hand, his already cut left hand cramps
and tightens into a claw under the strain of taking all the fish’s resistance.
Santiago is angered and frustrated by the weakness of his own body, but the
tuna, he hopes, will reinvigorate the hand. As he eats, he feels a brotherly
desire to feed the marlin too.
While waiting for the cramp in his hand to ease, Santiago looks across the
vast waters and thinks himself to be completely alone. A flight of ducks passes
overhead, and he realizes that it is impossible for a man to be alone on the
sea. The slant of the fishing line changes, indicating to the old fisherman
that the fish is approaching the surface. Suddenly, the fish leaps
magnificently into the air, and Santiago sees that it is bigger than any he has
ever witnessed; it is two feet longer than the skiff itself. Santiago declares
it “great” and promises never to let the fish learn its own strength. The line
races out until the fish slows to its earlier pace. By noon, the old man’s hand
is uncramped, and though he claims he is not religious, he says ten Hail Marys and
ten Our Fathers and promises that, if he catches the fish, he will make a
pilgrimage to the Virgin of Cobre. In case his struggle with the marlin should
continue for another night, Santiago baits another line in hopes of catching
another meal.
The second day of Santiago’s struggle with the marlin wears on. The old man
alternately questions and justifies seeking the death of such a noble opponent.
As dusk approaches, Santiago’s thoughts turn to baseball. The great DiMaggio,
thinks the old man, plays brilliantly despite the pain of a bone spur in his
heel. Santiago is not actually sure what a bone spur is, but he is sure he
would not be able to bear the pain of one himself. (A bone spur is an outgrowth
that projects from the bone.) He wonders if DiMaggio would stay with the
marlin. To boost his confidence, the old man recalls the great all-night
arm-wrestling match he won as a young man. Having beaten “the great negro from
Cienfuegos [a town in Cuba],” Santiago earned the title
El Campeón, or
“The Champion.”
Just before nightfall, a dolphin takes the second bait Santiago had dropped.
The old man hauls it in with one hand and clubs it dead. He saves the meat for
the following day. Although Santiago boasts to the marlin that he feels
prepared for their impending fight, he is really numb with pain. The stars come
out. Santiago considers the stars his friends, as he does the great marlin. He
considers himself lucky that his lot in life does not involve hunting anything
so great as the stars or the moon. Again, he feels sorry for the marlin, though
he is as determined as ever to kill it. The fish will feed many people,
Santiago decides, though they are not worthy of the creature’s great dignity.
By starlight, still bracing and handling the line, Santiago considers rigging
the oars so that the fish will have to pull harder and eventually tire itself
out. He fears this strategy would ultimately result in the loss of the fish. He
decides to “rest,” which really just means putting down his hands and letting
the line go across his back, instead of using his own strength to resist his
opponent.
After “resting” for two hours, Santiago chastises himself for not sleeping,
and he fears what could happen should his mind become “unclear.” He butchers
the dolphin he caught earlier and finds two flying fish in its belly. In the
chilling night, he eats half of a fillet of dolphin meat and one of the flying
fish. While the marlin is quiet, the old man decides to sleep. He has several
dreams: a school of porpoises leaps from and returns to the ocean; he is back
in his hut during a storm; and he again dreams of the lions on the beach in
Africa.
Analysis
The narrator tells us that Santiago does not mention the hawks that await
the little warbler because he thinks the bird will learn about them “soon
enough.” Hemingway tempers the grimness of Santiago’s observation with
Santiago’s feeling of deep connection with the warbler. He suggests that the
world, though designed to bring about death, is a vast, interconnected network
of life. Additionally, the warbler’s feeling of exhaustion and its ultimate
fate—destruction by predators—mirror Santiago’s own eventual exhaustion and the
marlin’s ravishment by sharks.
The brotherhood between Santiago and the surrounding world extends beyond
the warbler. The old man feels an intimate connection to the great fish, as
well as to the sea and stars. Santiago constantly pledges his love, respect,
and sentiment of brotherhood to the marlin. For this reason, the fish’s death
is not portrayed as senselessly tragic. Santiago, and seemingly Hemingway, feel
that since death
must come in the world, it is preferable that it come
at the hands of a worthy opponent. The old man’s magnificence—the honor and
humility with which he executes his task—elevates his struggle to a rarified,
even transcendent level.
Skills that involved great displays of strength captured Hemingway’s
imagination, and his fiction is filled with fishermen, big-game hunters,
bullfighters, prizefighters, and soldiers. Hemingway’s fiction presents a world
peopled almost exclusively by men—men who live most successfully in the world
through displays of skill. In Hemingway’s world, mere survival is not enough.
To elevate oneself above the masses, one must master the rules and rituals by
which men are judged. Time and again, we see Santiago displaying the art and
the rituals that make him a master of his trade. Only
his lines do not
drift carelessly in the current; only
he braves waters so far from
shore.
Rules and rituals dominate the rest of the old man’s life as well. When he
is not thinking about fishing, his mind turns to religion or baseball. Because
Santiago declares that he is not a religious man, his prayers to the Virgin of
Cobre seem less an appeal to a supernatural divinity and more a habit that orders
and provides a context for his daily experience. Similarly, Santiago’s worship
of Joe DiMaggio, and his constant comparisons between the baseball great and
himself, suggest his preference for worlds in which men are measured by a clear
set of standards. The great DiMaggio’s reputation is secured by his superlative
batting average as surely as Santiago’s will be by an eighteen-foot marlin.
Even though Santiago doesn’t consider himself a religious man, it is during
his struggle with the marlin that the book becomes strongly suggestive of a
Christian parable. As his struggle intensifies, Santiago begins to seem more
and more Christ-like: through his pain, suffering, and eventual defeat, he will
transcend his previous incarnation as a failed fisherman. Hemingway achieves
this effect by relying on the potent and, to many readers, familiar symbolism
identified with Jesus Christ’s life and death. The cuts on the old man’s hands
from the fishing line recall the stigmata—the crucifixion wounds of Jesus.
Santiago’s isolation, too, evokes that of Christ, who spent forty days alone in
the wilderness. Having taken his boat out on the ocean farther than any other
fisherman has ever gone, Santiago is beyond even the fringes of society.
Hemingway also unites the old man with marlin through Santiago’s frequent
expressions of his feeling of kinship. He thus suggests that the fate of one is
the fate of the other. Although they are opponents, Santiago and the marlin are
also partners, allies, and, in a sense, doubles. Thus, the following passage,
which links the marlin to Christ, implicitly links Santiago to Christ as well:
“Christ, I did not know he was so big.”
“I’ll kill him though,” [Santiago] said. “In all his greatness and his glory.”
Santiago’s expletive (“Christ”) and the laudatory phrase “his greatness and
his glory” link the fish’s fate to Christ’s. Because Santiago declares the
marlin his “true brother,” he implies that they share a common fate. When,
later in the book, sharks attack the marlin’s carcass, thereby attacking
Santiago as well, the sense of alliance between the old man and the fish
becomes even more explicit.
Day Four
From the marlin waking Santiago by jerking the line to
Santiago’s return to his shack
Summary
Then the fish came alive, with his death in him, and rose high out of the
water showing all his great length and width and all his power and his beauty.
The marlin wakes Santiago by jerking the line. The fish jumps out of the
water again and again, and Santiago is thrown into the bow of the skiff,
facedown in his dolphin meat. The line feeds out fast, and the old man brakes
against it with his back and hands. His left hand, especially, is badly cut.
Santiago wishes that the boy were with him to wet the coils of the line, which
would lessen the friction.
The old man wipes the crushed dolphin meat off his face, fearing that it
will make him nauseated and he will lose his strength. Looking at his damaged
hand, he reflects that “pain does not matter to a man.” He eats the second
flying fish in hopes of building up his strength. As the sun rises, the marlin
begins to circle. For hours the old man fights the circling fish for every inch
of line, slowly pulling it in. He feels faint and dizzy and sees black spots
before his eyes. The fish riots against the line, battering the boat with its
spear. When it passes under the boat, Santiago cannot believe its size. As the
marlin continues to circle, Santiago adds enough pressure to the line to bring
the fish closer and closer to the skiff. The old man thinks that the fish is
killing him, and admires him for it, saying, “I do not care who kills who.”
Eventually, he pulls the fish onto its side by the boat and plunges his harpoon
into it. The fish lurches out of the water, brilliantly and beautifully alive
as it dies. When it falls back into the water, its blood stains the waves.
The old man pulls the skiff up alongside the fish and fastens the fish to
the side of the boat. He thinks about how much money he will be able to make
from such a big fish, and he imagines that DiMaggio would be proud of him.
Santiago’s hands are so cut up that they resemble raw meat. With the mast up
and the sail drawn, man, fish, and boat head for land. In his light-headed
state, the old man finds himself wondering for a moment if he is bringing the
fish in or vice versa. He shakes some shrimp from a patch of gulf weed and eats
them raw. He watches the marlin carefully as the ship sails on. The old man’s
wounds remind him that his battle with the marlin was real and not a dream.
An hour later, a mako shark arrives, having smelled the marlin’s blood.
Except for its jaws full of talonlike teeth, the shark is a beautiful fish.
When the shark hits the marlin, the old man sinks his harpoon into the shark’s
head. The shark lashes on the water and, eventually, sinks, taking the harpoon
and the old man’s rope with it. The mako has taken nearly forty pounds of meat,
so fresh blood from the marlin spills into the water, inevitably drawing more
sharks to attack. Santiago realizes that his struggle with the marlin was for
nothing; all will soon be lost. But, he muses, “a man can be destroyed but not
defeated.”
Santiago tries to cheer himself by thinking that DiMaggio would be pleased
by his performance, and he wonders again if his hands equal DiMaggio’s bone
spurs as a handicap. He tries to be hopeful, thinking that it is silly, if not
sinful, to stop hoping. He reminds himself that he didn’t kill the marlin
simply for food, that he killed it out of pride and love. He wonders if it is a
sin to kill something you love. The shark, on the other hand, he does not feel
guilty about killing, because he did it in self-defense. He decides that “everything
kills everything else in some way.”
Two hours later, a pair of shovel-nosed sharks arrives, and Santiago makes a
noise likened to the sound a man might make as nails are driven through his
hands. The sharks attack, and Santiago fights them with a knife that he had
lashed to an oar as a makeshift weapon. He enjoyed killing the mako because it
was a worthy opponent, a mighty and fearless predator, but he has nothing but
disdain for the scavenging shovel-nosed sharks. The old man kills them both, but
not before they take a good quarter of the marlin, including the best meat.
Again, Santiago wishes that he hadn’t killed the marlin. He apologizes to the
dead marlin for having gone out so far, saying it did neither of them any good.
Still hopeful that the whole ordeal had been a dream, Santiago cannot bear
to look at the mutilated marlin. Another shovel-nosed shark arrives. The old
man kills it, but he loses his knife in the process. Just before nightfall, two
more sharks approach. The old man’s arsenal has been reduced to the club he
uses to kill bait fish. He manages to club the sharks into retreat, but not
before they repeatedly maul the marlin. Stiff, sore, and weary, he hopes he
does not have to fight anymore. He even dares to imagine making it home with
the half-fish that remains. Again, he apologizes to the marlin carcass and
attempts to console it by reminding the fish how many sharks he has killed. He
wonders how many sharks the marlin killed when it was alive, and he pledges to
fight the sharks until he dies. Although he hopes to be lucky, Santiago
believes that he “violated [his] luck” when he sailed too far out.
Around midnight, a pack of sharks arrives. Near-blind in the darkness,
Santiago strikes out at the sounds of jaws and fins. Something snatches his
club. He breaks off the boat’s tiller and makes a futile attempt to use it as a
weapon. When the last shark tries to tear at the tough head of the marlin, the
old man clubs the shark until the tiller splinters. He plunges the sharp edge
into the shark’s flesh and the beast lets go. No meat is left on the marlin.
The old man spits blood into the water, which frightens him for a moment. He
settles in to steer the boat, numb and past all feeling. He asks himself what
it was that defeated him and concludes, “Nothing . . . I went out too far.”
When he reaches the harbor, all lights are out and no one is near. He notices
the skeleton of the fish still tied to the skiff. He takes down the mast and
begins to shoulder it up the hill to his shack. It is terrifically heavy, and
he is forced to sit down five times before he reaches his home. Once there, the
old man sleeps.
Analysis
You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it
is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?
The fantastical final stage of the old man’s fight with the fish brings two
thematic issues to the forefront. The first concerns man’s place in nature, the
second concerns nature itself. It is possible to interpret Santiago’s journey
as a cautionary tale of sorts, a tragic lesson about what happens when man’s
pride forces him beyond the boundaries of his rightful, human place in the
world. This interpretation is undermined, however, by the fact that Santiago
finds the place where he is most completely, honestly, and fully himself only
by sailing out farther than he ever has before. Indeed, Santiago has not left
his true place; he has
found it, which suggests that man’s greatest
potential can be found in his return to the natural world from which modern
advancements have driven him.
At one point, Santiago embraces his unity with the marlin, thinking, “You
are killing me, fish . . . But you have a right to . . . brother. Come on and
kill me. I do not care who kills who.” This realization speaks to the novella’s
theory of the natural world. As Santiago’s exhausting and near-endless battle
with the marlin shows, his is a world in which life and death go hand in loving
hand. Everything in the world must die, and according to Santiago, only a
brotherhood between men—or creatures—can alleviate the grimness of that fact.
The death of the marlin serves as a beautiful case in point, for as the fish
dies it is not only transformed into something larger than itself, it is also
charged with life: “Then the fish came alive, with his death in him.” In
Hemingway’s conception of the natural world, beauty is deadly, age is strength,
and death is the greatest instance of vitality.
The transformation that the fish undergoes upon its death anticipates the
transformation that awaits Santiago in the novella’s final pages. The old man’s
battle with the fish is marked by supreme pain and suffering, but he lives in a
world in which extreme pain can be a source of triumph rather than defeat. The
key to Santiago’s triumph, as the end of the novel makes clear, is an almost
martyrlike endurance, a quality that the old man knows and values. Santiago
repeatedly reminds himself that physical pain does not matter to a man, and he
urges himself to keep his head clear and to know how to suffer like a man.
After the arrival of the mako shark, Santiago seems preoccupied with the
notion of hope. Hope is shown to be a necessary component of endurance, so much
so that the novella seems to suggest that endurance can be found wherever pain
and hope meet. As Santiago sails on while the sharks continue to attack his
catch, the narrator says that Santiago “was full of resolution but he had
little hope”; later, the narrator comments, “He hit [the shark] without hope
but with resolution.” But without hope Santiago has reason neither to fight the
sharks nor to return home. He soon realizes that it is silly not to hope, and
he even goes so far as to consider it a sin. Ultimately, he overcomes the shark
attack by
bearing it. The poet and critic Delmore Schwartz regards
The
Old Man and the Sea as a dramatic development in Hemingway’s career because
Santiago’s “sober hope” strikes a sort of compromise between youthful naïveté
and the jadedness of age. Before the novella, Hemingway had given the world
heroes who lived either shrouded by illusions, such as Nick Adams in “Indian
Camp,” or crushed by disillusionment, such as Frederic Henry in
A Farewell
to Arms.
Day Five
From Manolin bringing the old man coffee to the old man’s
return to sleep to dream, once again, about the lions
Summary
Early the next morning, Manolin comes to the old man’s shack, and the sight
of his friend’s ravaged hands brings him to tears. He goes to fetch coffee.
Fishermen have gathered around Santiago’s boat and measured the carcass at
eighteen feet. Manolin waits for the old man to wake up, keeping his coffee
warm for him so it is ready right away. When the old man wakes, he and Manolin
talk warmly. Santiago says that the sharks beat him, and Manolin insists that
he will work with the old man again, regardless of what his parents say. He
reveals that there had been a search for Santiago involving the coast guard and
planes. Santiago is happy to have someone to talk to, and after he and Manolin
make plans, the old man sleeps again. Manolin leaves to find food and the
newspapers for the old man, and to tell Pedrico that the marlin’s head is his.
That afternoon two tourists at the terrace café mistake the great skeleton for
that of a shark. Manolin continues to watch over the old man as he sleeps and
dreams of the lions.
Analysis
Given the depth of Santiago’s tragedy—most likely Santiago will never have
the opportunity to catch another such fish in his lifetime—
The Old Man and
the Sea ends on a rather optimistic note. Santiago is reunited with
Manolin, who desperately wants to complete his training. All of the old man’s
noble qualities and, more important, the lessons he draws from his experience,
will be passed on to the boy, which means that the fisherman’s life will
continue on, in some form, even after his death. The promise of triumph and
regeneration is supported by the closing image of the book. For the third time,
Santiago returns to his dream of the lions at play on the African beaches. As
an image that recalls the old man’s youth, the lions suggest the circularity of
life. They also suggest the harmony—the lions are, after all, playing—that
exists between the opposing forces of nature.
The hope that Santiago clings to at the novella’s close is not the hope that
comes from naïveté. It is, rather, a hope that comes from experience, of
something new emerging from something old, as a phoenix rises out of the ashes.
The novella states as much when Santiago reflects that “a man can be destroyed
but not defeated.” The destruction of the marlin is not a defeat for Santiago;
rather, it leads to his redemption. Indeed, the fishermen who once mocked him
now stand in awe of him. The decimation of the marlin, of course, is a
significant loss. The sharks strip Santiago of his greater glory as surely as
they strip the great fish of its flesh. But to view the shark attack as
precipitating only loss is to see but half the picture. When Santiago says,
“Fishing kills me exactly as it keeps me alive,” he is pointing, once again, to
the vast, necessary, and ever-shifting tension that exists between loss and
gain, triumph and defeat, life and death.
In the final pages of the novella, Hemingway employs a number of images that
link Santiago to Christ, the model of transcendence, who turned loss into gain,
defeat into triumph, and even death into new life. Hemingway unabashedly paints
the old man as a crucified martyr: as soon as the sharks arrive, the narrator
comments that the noise Santiago made resembled the noise one would make
“feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.” The narrator’s
description of Santiago’s return to town also recalls the crucifixion. As the
old man struggles up the hill with his mast across his shoulders, the reader
cannot help but recall Christ’s march toward Calvary. Even the position in
which he collapses on his bed—he sleeps facedown on the newspapers with his
arms out straight and the palms of his hands up—brings to mind the image of
Christ suffering on the cross.
Important
Quotations Explained
1. He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of
great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor
of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and of the lions on the beach. They
played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy.
Since the publication of The Old
Man and the Sea, there has been much debate surrounding the story’s
symbols. Does the old man represent the author nearing the end of his career?
Do the vicious sharks stand for cruel literary critics or the inevitably
destructive forces of nature? While most readers agree that, as a parable, The
Old Man and the Sea addresses universal life, the image of the lions
playing on the African beach, which is presented three times in the novel,
remains something of an enigma. Like poetry, the lions are supremely suggestive
without being tethered to a single meaning. Indeed, the only certainty about
the image is that it serves as a source of comfort and renewal for Santiago.
This passage, which describes
Santiago’s dreams on the night before he sets out for his fishing expedition
(the first day that the narrative covers), simultaneously confirms and moves
beyond Hemingway’s immediately recognizable vision of the universe. Hemingway
made his career telling stories about “great occurrences,” “great fish,” and
“contests of strength.” The fact that Santiago no longer dreams of any of these
makes him unique among Hemingway’s heroes. Of course, by dreaming of lions he
is still in a recognizably “Hemingwayesque” world, but the lions here are at
play and thus suggest a time of youth and ease. They are also linked explicitly
to Manolin, a connection that is made apparent at the end of the novel as the
boy watches over his aged friend as Santiago’s dream of the lions returns.
2. Just then the stern line came taut under his foot, where
he had kept the loop of the line, and he dropped his oars and felt the weight
of the small tuna’s shivering pull as he held the line firm and commenced to
haul it in. The shivering increased as he pulled in and he could see the blue
back of the fish in the water and the gold of his sides before he swung him
over the side and into the boat. He lay in the stern in the sun, compact and
bullet shaped, his big, unintelligent eyes staring as he thumped his life out
against the planking of the boat with the quick shivering strokes of his neat,
fast-moving tail. The old man hit him on the head for kindness and kicked him,
his body still shuddering, under the shade of the stern.
This passage, which describes
Santiago’s hauling in of the tuna on the second day of the narrative,
exemplifies the power and beauty of the simple, evocative style of prose that
earned Hemingway his reputation as a revolutionary and influenced generations
of writers to come. Hemingway’s strength and mastery lies in his ability to
render concrete but still poetic images using familiar words and simple
vocabulary. The scene above is instantly familiar, even to the many readers who
have no experience hauling in fish. For instance, the “compact and bullet
shaped” fish is remarkably visible as it shivers and shudders on the floor of
the skiff. Hemingway loads the passage with carefully chosen sounds. For
instance, the repetition of the “k” and “s” sounds in the last sentence
suggests a calm, rhythmic motion, like the breaking of waves against the boat
or the side-to-side twitching of the fish’s body.
The passage also demonstrates the
psychological depths Hemingway could access despite his incredible economy of
language. When the old man hits the fish on the head, Hemingway qualifies the
action with only two words: “for kindness.” These two words, however, give the
reader full insight into the old man’s character. Hemingway renders Santiago’s
connection to, and respect and love for, the world in which he lives without
reporting the old man’s innermost thoughts. Instead, using two well-chosen
words, he hints at a depth of feeling that makes Santiago who he is. Hemingway
described this technique as the “iceberg principle,” for he believed that the
simplest writing, when done well, would hint at the greatest human truths, just
as the tip of an iceberg hinted at the terrific frozen mass that rested
underwater.
3. “I have never seen or heard of
such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the
stars.” Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The
moon runs away. . . . Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to
eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. . .
. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his
great dignity. I do not understand these things, he thought. But it is good
that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is
enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.
This passage is found at the end of
the third day related by the novella. As Santiago struggles with the marlin, he
reflects upon the nature of the universe and his place in it. He displays both
pity for the fish and an unflagging determination to kill it, because the
marlin’s death helps to reinvigorate the fisherman’s life. The predatory nature
of this exchange is inevitable, for just as hawks will continue to hunt
warblers, men will continue to kill marlin, and sharks will continue to rob
them of their catches. The cruelty of this natural order is subverted, however,
because of the kinship Santiago feels for his prey. His opponent is worthy—so
worthy, in fact, that he later goes on to say that it doesn’t matter who kills
whom. There is, in the old man’s estimation, some sense to this order. Man can
achieve greatness only when placed in a well-matched contest against his
earthly brothers. To find glory, Santiago does not need to extend himself
beyond his animal nature by looking to the sun or the stars.
4. Then the fish came alive, with
his death in him, and rose high out of the water showing all his great length
and width and all his power and his beauty. He seemed to hang in the air above
the old man in the skiff. Then he fell into the water with a crash that sent
spray over the old man and over all of the skiff.
The killing of the marlin, which
occurs on the fourth day of the narrative, marks the climax of the novella. The
end of the marlin’s life is the most vital of moments, as the fish comes alive
“with his death in him” and exhibits to Santiago, more strongly than ever
before, “all his power and his beauty.” The fish seems to transcend his own
death, because it invests him with a new life. This notion of transcendence is
important, for it resounds within Santiago’s story. Like the fish, the old man
suffers something of a death on his way back to the village. He is stripped of
his quarry and, given his age, will likely never have the opportunity to land
such a magnificent fish again. Nevertheless, he returns to the village with his
spirit and his reputation revitalized.
5. You did not kill the fish only to
keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and
because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him
after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?
As Santiago sails back to his
village on the fourth day of the novella, towing behind him the carcass of the
decimated marlin, he tries to make sense of the destruction he has witnessed.
He feels deeply apologetic toward the fish, which he sees as too dignified for
such a wasteful end. He attempts to explain to himself his reasons for killing
the fish, and admits that his desire to hunt the fish stemmed from the very
same quality that led to its eventual destruction: his pride. He then justifies
his behavior by claiming that his slaying of the marlin was necessitated by his
love and respect for it. Indeed, when Santiago kills the fish, the loss of life
is somehow transcendently beautiful, as opposed to the bold, senseless
scavenging on the part of the sharks.
Study Questions & Essay Topics
Study Questions
1. What is the role of the sea in
The Old
Man and the Sea?
2. Santiago is considered by many readers to
be a tragic hero, in that his greatest strength—his pride—leads to his eventual
downfall. Discuss the role of pride in Santiago’s plight.
3. Discuss religious symbolism in
The Old
Man and the Sea. To what effect does Hemingway employ such images?
Suggested Essay Topics
1. Discuss Hemingway’s “iceberg” principle of
writing in relation to
The Old Man and the Sea.
2. What significance do the lions on the beach
have for the old man?
3. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated,”
says the old man after the first shark attack. At the end of the story, is the
old man defeated? Why or why not?
4. The Old Man and the Sea is,
essentially, the story of a single character. Indeed, other than the old man,
only one human being receives any kind of prolonged attention. Discuss the role
of Manolin in the novella. Is he necessary to the book?