Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is a moving novel about the human will and the dignity of life through the struggles of a lonely old man.
About the artwork
The Old Man and the Sea is a middle grade novel by American novelist Ernest Hemingway, published in 1952. It was first published in the magazine Life, and after an overwhelming response, it was published as a book within a week. It won the Pulitzer Prize the following year and contributed to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
The novel tells the story of an old man who makes his living fishing off the coast of Cuba in Hemingway’s characteristically simple yet powerful prose. The author’s philosophy, style, and skill are concentrated in this short story, which is told from the point of view of the first-person protagonist and the omniscient author. The inner psychology of the old man who fights against the giant fish with indomitable will is described through the first-person perspective, and the development of other situations is described through the omniscient author’s perspective.
Hemingway is known for his fascination with humans proving their worth by challenging and fighting against nature. When a marlin with a body longer than his boat is hooked, the old man tests his limits by pulling the line until his hands bleed. In the deserted waters of the Gulf of Mexico, he wages a solitary struggle against himself, the fish, and the sea, and ultimately triumphs.
This work is the artist’s interpretation of life. The sea represents the reality of human life, the fish represents the goal of life, and the shark represents the trials of life. The artist testifies to the meaning and dignity of human life by epically depicting a protagonist who overcomes his limitations with courage and determination.
The plot
Santiago, an old man who fishes in a carved boat in the Gulf of Mexico, has not caught a single fish in the last 84 days. He has a young assistant named Manolin. Manolin’s parents sent the boy to another fisherman because of the old man’s bad luck, but the boy respected the old man enough to help him organize his fishing tools and bring him food.
On the 85th day, the old man went out to sea and finally caught a big marlin. The fish was so big that he couldn’t pull it onto the boat. Instead, the fish was pulling the boat down. For two days, the old man held on to the line with his whole body. On the third day, he used all his remaining strength to pull the fish up and harpoon it to death, ending the long fight in victory.
But as he returned to the boat with the fish, its blood attracted a school of sharks. The old man desperately fought the sharks, but was unable to defeat them all. Eventually, the sharks ate all the meat, leaving only the bones. The old man returned to the harbor dragging only the bones.
As the old man drifted off to sleep, in the harbor, fishermen crowded around the marlin bones, mistaking them for those of the shark. The boy cried with relief that the old man was safe, and brought him a newspaper and coffee. As the old man fell back to sleep and dreamed of lions, the boy sat motionless beside him, protecting him.
Introducing the characters
Santiago (the old man): the protagonist of the novel, he is an old man who fishes in the Gulf of Mexico with a carved boat. He has no family and lives alone in a dilapidated shack overlooking the beach. He is frail and shabby, but has the strength of a sailor. He has an indomitable will and feels a deep friendship with the boy, nature, and the fish he catches.
Manolin (Boy) : Manolin has been working as an assistant since he was five years old, learning to fish from an old man. Although he works on other boats away from his parents, he helps the old man every day by carrying fishing gear and bringing him bait and food. He talks to the old man about fishing and baseball. He has great respect for the old man and wants to learn a lot from him.
Commentary
In the history of world literature, few authors are more popular than the American writer Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). Although he is often referred to as the “American Shakespeare,” he was an iconic writer who symbolized American literature in a narrow sense and American culture in a broader sense. He is, in a sense, the Elvis Presley of American literature. You can’t talk about American popular music without Presley, and you can’t talk about American literature without Hemingway. Thomas Carlyle said that William Shakespeare was irreplaceable to colonial India, but there are probably many Americans who would argue that Hemingway is irreplaceable to the state of Alaska or the island of Hawaii.
The Old Man and the Sea (1952) is Hemingway’s last “swan song”. It was the last work he published before his death in 1961. Of course, several of his works were published after his death, but The Old Man and the Sea was the last novel he published while he was still alive. Whether it’s because it’s his last work or because it’s a great work, this novel is truly Hemingway’s final masterpiece.
Background and content
Ernest Hemingway began writing The Old Man and the Sea in early 1951, when he was living near Havana, the capital of Cuba. He finished the first draft in late April and sent the manuscript to Charles Scribner’s in New York in March 1952. It was reprinted in a special issue of the current affairs weekly Life on September 1, 1952. The magazine was so popular that it sold 5.3 million copies in two days. A week later, it was published in paperback and was immediately popular with readers.
However, Hemingway’s conception of The Old Man and the Sea dates back 15 years before the novel’s publication. In April 1936, he published a prose piece in the monthly magazine Esquire. As the subtitle suggests, “Letters from the Gulf Stream of Mexico,” Hemingway was envisioning a story about deep-sea fishing in the vast expanse of the ocean.
In this prose piece, a Cuban fisherman is out fishing in the far reaches of the Gulf of Mexico, and after a hard-fought battle, he catches a marlin weighing several hundred kilograms. On the way back to port, however, the marlin is taken by a school of sharks, and the fisherman is found by another fisherman near the harbor in a near-delirium. This short piece of prose is as bony and unremarkable as the marlin after it arrives at the harbor.
However, this prose piece was undoubtedly the foundation upon which Hemingway would later build the house of The Old Man and the Sea. At their basic bones, the two works bear a striking resemblance to each other. Whereas Islands in the Stream is a nonfiction work based on the real-life experiences of Hemingway’s fishing buddy Gregorio Fuentes, a keyboat fisherman on the Pilar, a boat owned by the author, The Old Man and the Sea is a work of fiction featuring the fictionalized character of Santiago. In other words, Hemingway fleshed out his nonfiction work and gave it life and blood, finally creating a work of art in The Old Man and the Sea.
Hemingway’s publication of The Old Man and the Sea in 1952 was a major milestone in his literary career. After the publication of For Whom The Bell Tolls, about the Spanish Civil War, he had been silent for more than a decade and had not produced anything of note. He did publish a novel a decade ago, “Across the River and Into the Woods,” but critics and readers were lukewarm to it. “Papa’s (Hemingway’s nickname at this point) days are numbered,” some critics openly declared. The Old Man and the Sea was all the more significant for Hemingway because it was written in the midst of a near death sentence for him.
The sea as a metaphor for life
There’s a good reason why Ernest Hemingway chose the sea as a spatial setting. Just as poets often liken life to a voyage, the sea is a great metaphor for the human condition. For Hemingway, of course, the battlefield, where Frederick risks his life to carry wounded soldiers in A Farewell to Arms, and the rear, where Robert Jordan carries out a dangerous operation to blow up a bridge in For Whom The Bell Tolls, are also places of life, as are the bullring, where bullfighters like Pedro Romero compete with bulls in The Sun Also Rises.
But Hemingway, in his later years, chose the ocean as a better metaphor for the struggle for survival. He was so interested in the ocean that he even called the Bible “a sea of knowledge” because it is a “book of the sea. Of course, he used the metaphor in the sense that the Bible is a vast treasure trove of knowledge, but he also compared the Bible itself to a deep ocean. Few writers have elevated the ocean to such a religious level as Hemingway.
On a more personal level, in The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway artfully symbolizes his resistance to old age. He was already fifty-two years old when he wrote it. By today’s standards, this would still be considered old age, but in a time when medicine was not as advanced as it is today, and when Hemingway had suffered accidents, both large and small, during his youthful outdoor adventures, he was in his early twenties. By this time, he was also suffering from several adult diseases, including high blood pressure and diabetes, as well as depression and alcoholism.
In the novel, Santiago’s death-defying act of catching a giant marlin is a symbolic act of defeating the old age that was soon to befall him. At a whopping 5.5 meters long, or 61 centimeters longer than the fishing boat Santiago is on, the marlin represents old age and senility.
Moreover, by this time Hemingway was in a state of artistic exhaustion as much as physical decline. For someone who considered art to be almost a religion, nothing would have been more devastating than not being able to write great work. The marlin symbolizes the brilliant artistic high he is trying to regain, and his desperate attempt to catch it symbolizes his artistic resurgence.
The central theme of the work
Heroism and Stoicism are probably at the top of Ernest Hemingway’s list of themes in The Old Man and the Sea. Santiago, who battles first a marlin and then a school of sharks, is like Sisyphus in Greek mythology.
Few of Hemingway’s protagonists overcome such trials and adversity with such dignity. His efforts are all the more valuable and precious because he is an old man in the twilight of his life, not a young man like Frederick Henry or a man of great age like Robert Jordan.
As is often the case with ascetics, mental victories are just as valuable as material ones, perhaps even more so. Santiago catches a marlin bigger than his boat, but eventually loses it all to a school of sharks. He fights and kills five sharks in defense of the marlin, and by the time he returns to port, the marlin has been torn apart by the sharks, leaving only its bones. “But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” Santiago says as he fights the sharks.
At first glance, there may not seem to be much difference between ‘defeat’ and ‘destruction’. In fact, if you look at the dictionary, the former means to lose a battle against something, while the latter means to be destroyed and disappear. So ‘Destruction’ can be seen as a consequence of ‘Defeat’. However, here Hemingway, borrowing from Santiago, makes a strict distinction between material and spiritual victory: ‘Destruction’ is related to material and physical values, while ‘Defeat’ is only related to spiritual values.
If human life is ultimately an unwinnable struggle, it is the bonds between human beings that make this struggle more meaningful. In The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway emphasizes the importance of human solidarity and cooperation. In today’s terms, Santiago is a “solitary old man” who lives alone, but he has a boy named Manolin who befriends him and the townspeople who help him at every opportunity. Santiago likes DiMaggio of the New York Yankees so much because, unlike other players, DiMaggio works together to win games.
In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway shows an eco-friendly attitude towards nature. In this respect, at least, it can be read as a “green novel”. Santiago cares deeply about all the creatures that live in the sea. No matter how big or small they are, they are all his dear friends, his brothers and sisters from the same parent. For Santiago, humans are just another part of nature.
Even the ocean, not to mention the land, is seen by Santiago as a woman, a benevolent mother. The ocean, he says, is “something that gives us great grace and also takes it away. Just as humans suckle the milk of the earth, we also receive all kinds of nourishment from the sea. If we think of the earth and the ocean as benevolent mothers, as Santiago does, our attitude toward nature will change. Just as a child cannot treat his mother with disrespect, we cannot treat nature with disrespect.
