“The Old Man and the Sea” depicts the indomitable will of the human spirit through the lonely struggle of an old man. The spirit of hope and defiance in the face of failure is the true triumph of life.
The humanism of self-overcoming
The Old Man and the Sea weaves together a story of one man’s perseverance in the face of adversity. The old man, Santiago, is alone at sea and struggles heroically with conviction, courage, and perseverance that other fishermen lack. It can be said that Hemingway’s dramatism, which is an intensive expression of his life and worldview, is expressed through the novelistic technique of Santiago. Through Santiago, Hemingway presents his own code of behavior, which is simple yet sophisticated, with faith and courage. Courage is essential for living a life that is not always easy, and this work is especially characterized by the extreme endurance of suffering.
Santiago, the fisherman, is a man who refuses to admit defeat in his struggle, even after 84 days without catching a single fish, because he is convinced that he will catch a big fish. At dawn on the 85th day, he receives a transmission from a boy and paddles out alone into the deep Gulf of Mexico, far from the Cuban coast. Around noon on his first day out, he finally hooks an 18-foot blue marlin. He fights the marlin for two days and two nights, enduring a lot of physical and mental pain until he kills it. Santiago demonstrates his willpower in his struggle with the marlin.
The Old Man and the Sea has its own unique personality, characterized by challenges and courage. Santiago’s life is lived in the great outdoors, away from modern society and organizations. His fishing gear is primitive, his feet are bare, he lives with the help and love of his neighbors, and he lives with the sea. While fighting a marlin, his left hand gets a cramp and it’s very painful, but he doesn’t admit to any pain. He lives his life without accepting pain as suffering, and he solves his own problems in the face of the reality he is confronting because each moment of action is accompanied by the challenge and courage to feel the tension and fulfillment of life.
In “The Old Man and the Sea,” we see Santiago patiently dealing with all kinds of difficult human problems, not just the extremism of enduring a fatal wound. The suicide rate is increasing significantly due to social unrest and economic difficulties, and it has become a serious social phenomenon, with suicides among the elderly over the age of 60, middle-aged workers trying to escape from the anxious times, and adolescents suiciding due to pessimism in school.
All of us living in modern times have lacked the extremism to endure patiently and the will to overcome difficult challenges. Therefore, in order to overcome this condition, it is necessary to have the active courage to live life without accepting suffering as suffering, to feel the tension and fulfillment of life in each moment of extreme action, and to solve one’s own problems in the reality of one’s situation without looking for salvation outside of oneself.
Old Santiago, a man of patience, courage, and willpower, finds his indomitable spirit in the dream of DiMaggio and the lion. Santiago regains his courage by thinking of DiMaggio, who, despite the pain in his heel, has shown great strength in playing baseball and successfully leading his team. So whenever Santiago feels weak, he thinks of DiMaggio and tries to emulate his superhuman willpower, and DiMaggio is always present in Santiago’s consciousness. Santiago is not praising him for his fame, but for his perseverance in overcoming the handicap of his heel pain.
In this way, young people need a spiritual guide to inspire them with hope and courage, but I would like to ask whether modern society is not an era of “absence of spiritual guides.” Young people are seen as weak, fragile, impulsive, and self-centered. Most of them are born in an atmosphere of affluence and grow up without knowing any great difficulties, so they tend to be unable to endure small adversities and suffering. Just as Santiago can find courage to overcome hardships and adversity in a mirror like DiMaggio’s, so too do young people need a spiritual support from which they can learn about true life in a true mirror.
For the old man, DiMaggio is symbolized as a hero who rises above difficulties and accomplishes great things. After the struggle with the marlin, the old man feels helpless, but by imitating DiMaggio, he has the courage to fight to the end. Another element that gives Santiago hope and courage is his dream of a lion on the African coast. Young lions playing innocently at sunset on a long golden coast and silver white sandy beaches symbolize youth and courage for Santiago. DiMaggio and the lions became a source of hope, strength, courage, and indomitable willpower for Santiago in times of despair.
Santiago the Elder, though physically frail, possessed an indomitable spirit. He was a man of strong spirit who was undaunted by poverty and faced his trials with courage and perseverance. Through Santiago, Hemingway shows human integrity and true humanism by expressing his proactive behavior.
The friendship between the old man and the boy
In “The Old Man and the Sea,” Hemingway depicts Santiago, the protagonist of “The Old Man and the Sea,” as he breaks away from his early individualistic escapism and social concerns and pursues a sincere life based on human integrity, courage, friendship, and fraternal love. This work can be said to be the culmination of Hemingway’s ideas, outlook on life, and love.
Hemingway’s spirit of camaraderie is present throughout his works, from The Sun Also Rises to The Old Man and the Sea. The basic characteristic of respecting an individual’s personality, regardless of his or her status or position, is the foundation of the spirit of camaraderie. The concept of fraternal humanity emerges when the protagonist and those around him are in an inferior position to the protagonist. Normally, humans try to have a friendly relationship with those who are above them, but Hemingway transcended that limit and showed saintly humanity.
Hemingway’s ideas of humanity are most evident in The Old Man and the Sea. The story revolves around the relationship between Santiago, the protagonist, and Manolin, a young girl, Martin, the owner of the terrace house, and Pedrico, the tavern owner. Among them, the relationship between Santiago and Manolín is deeply rooted in the spirit of friendship. The Old Man and the Sea is unusual in that it is not a love story between a man and a woman, but a friendship.
The protagonist, Santiago, is a fisherman in the Gulf of Mexico, and he hasn’t caught a fish for 84 days, which makes him even more exhausted, but Manolin’s spiritual comfort and material support keep him confident and hopeful, and he endures the bad luck. The boy even carries his meals to him. In the early morning hours of the 85th day of fishing, Manolin rubs his sleepy eyes and brings him a simple breakfast and coffee, while the old man brings him sardines to use as bait later in the day. The old man doesn’t even think about whether accepting the boy’s rescue is a sign of weakness or pride, because their relationship has already become one of genuine human friendship.
The boy’s role and love for the elderly man is a manifestation of the highest form of friendship between men and women that transcends reason. The fact that Hemingway chose a boy of the female line is very unusual, and it shows that the author had a broadened view of women and affection, and that his ideas had reached the peak of maturity.
As the old man struggles with all his might not to lose to the marlin, he wishes for the boy to be by his side, but realizes that he is now alone. This need for the boy is more desperate than a man’s cries of love when he loves a woman. This boy is the companion and lover the old man needs in his life. In this way, the old man fights with the marlin and searches for the boy all night while suffering from anguish. When humans are in pain, they usually look for someone to love and rely on, and the relationship between the old man and the boy must be one of great longing and love. The relationship between the old man and the boy is not based on trust or dependence based on love between men and women, but purely on the nature of human love.
In “The Old Man and the Sea,” Hemingway not only emphasizes animals as equal to humans, but he does not limit himself to animals, but treats almost everything as being on the same level as Santiago, a human being. Thus, for the old man, the wind and his bed are his friends, as is the meat he is fighting for. Santiago is an old man in body, but in spirit, he is like Hemingway, a boy who grew up immersed in nature and became an adult, experiencing the evils of the world, such as artificial customs, traditions, and wars, but not being discouraged and finding affirmation in nature, and he and Manolin are able to see nature and love nature.
The fight between the old man and the marlin is not against the laws of nature. What matters is not the winner or the loser, but the struggle to do the best you can. Santiago’s obedience to the laws of nature and doing his best in a given situation is what makes The Old Man and the Sea the pinnacle of Hemingway’s work. Hemingway’s maturation as a human being has brought his literary ideologies and life beliefs to fruition on a level where love has evolved into a world of friendship and universal love.
Hemingway’s view of nature
Santiago sees himself as part of and identical with nature, and his view of the universe as an organized unity, based on a pantheistic attitude that the universe is related to and eternal and immortal. Everyone looks at nature, but few can see it in a deep and comprehensive sense. Those who can see nature rightly are those with a childlike purity of soul, who have the intuition to see reality beyond all metaphysics.
The Old Man and the Sea is a great example of this view of nature. Santiago is completely in tune with nature. He is a fisherman who fishes off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. He lives by the sea, his skin is tanned brown from the sun, his eyes are the color of the sea, the color of nature that never changes. His house is made of a palm tree called guano, and consists of a bed, a table, a chair, and a kitchen. He is steeped in primitive practices, such as using seawater as medicine when his hands bleed. The sea is the most natural place to live in Santiago, with the sun, moon and stars overhead, the sea moving and fish swimming beneath the boat, birds flying and the wind blowing around the boat.
The old man, familiar with nature, talks to the fish, birds, and stars. He never assimilates with other old people who seek only artificial phenomena around him. His spirit is always with the boy Manolin and the great baseball player DiMaggio, and he has a positive outlook on life, often meeting in his dreams the lions he saw in his youth. He lives with joy in all of this.
He is an old man in body, but in spirit he is the same boy who grew up immersed in the nature of Walloon Lake from an early age. He is so sensitive to nature that he can predict the weather and navigate the ocean without a compass by observing the changes in the sky, the colors of the sea and the direction of the wind. When he is fishing, he dreams of a pod of dolphins eight miles long. Most of his dreams were about meat and lions. In other words, he immerses himself in a place far away from the shores and beaches of Africa in its natural state. Santiago considers all natural things to be his friends, and nature itself is his home, his society, his world.
Santiago’s world is stable, peaceful, and happy from the beginning, and the uncharted waters offshore are a constant display of nature’s sublime beauty. In this natural world, Santiago is never alienated or lonely. Santiago’s faith and confidence come not from human society, but from the bounty of nature. Santiago is not compared to other humans, but to nature itself. In this way, by equating Santiago with nature, Hemingway injects a sense of grandeur into his story.
Fish and meteors are both parts of nature. But Santiago believes that catching fish is natural, while trying to kill the moon and sun is against natural law. He adapts himself to natural law and lives within it. With his intuition, Santiago sees all the essence of the ocean. He recognizes his presence in all the objects of nature: the sky, birds, clouds, fish, etc. He even has a friendly conversation with a small bird that sits on his sailboat. All of them are in perfect harmony, forming a unified, holistic beauty of nature.
Santiago is humbled by the sea. Isolated from nature, fishermen try to conquer the sea for their own benefit from a position of superiority, but Santiago never tries to catch fish in a dishonorable way. He accepts that it is a natural law of nature that some creatures must kill others in order to survive.
The Old Man and the Sea is a story of courage, perseverance, pride, humility, and death. Like the classic tragedy of a man who fights a powerful adversary and is deprived of any tangible reward, only to emerge victorious in spirit, Santiago is robbed of his marlin in a fight with a shark, and in the end he has nothing to show for it, having fought to the best of his ability. However, Santiago is a spiritual winner because he has managed to keep the values he has achieved intact, in accordance with his code of conduct.
When Santiago decides to fight to the death, he kills the marlin not just for physical needs, but to protect his pride and profession as a fisherman, but because it is the law of nature, and he feels love for the marlin as a brother. Man, meat, and birds are all the same creature, and it is the same thing that makes them empathize with each other, so they feel love like a long-lost friend on a lost sea. The old man was in great physical pain because he had been fighting with the marlin all night, but talking to the bird revitalized his energy. This feeling of empathy and love, even for a bird, is generated by the idea that one is part of nature and is identical to it.
Therefore, all of nature’s creatures, which are united with nature and have spirits, communicate with Santiago’s spirit. The indomitable spirit of Santiago, who believes that the body can be destroyed but the spirit can never be defeated and will live on forever, sees nature as an organized whole. In this state of mind, he sees the stars, sun, and moon as his brothers, and this sense of brotherhood makes him feel less alone in his struggle and gives him the strength to win.
