A fierce struggle between an old fisherman and a giant fish on a rough sea. The Old Man and the Sea is a story of struggle, of human will, of loneliness, and of the sublimity of life.
The Old Man and the Sea was the last work published by American novelist Ernest Hemingway during his lifetime, and it is still his most popular work, loved by readers around the world. Especially since 2012, when the copyright protection period expired, the number of translations has increased, making it even more popular.
The Old Man and the Sea was written in 1951 on Cuba’s Cayo Blanco (White Island) and first published on September 1, 1952 in Life magazine. The response was enthusiastic, and the magazine sold five million copies in two days. A week later, The Old Man and the Sea was published in paperback, with a first printing of 50,000 copies. The cover of the early Scribner’s edition boldly proclaimed “a new classic,” and critics responded favorably, comparing The Old Man and the Sea to works like William Faulkner’s The Bear and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. For Hemingway, it was a triumphant comeback after the harsh reviews of his first novel in a decade, Across the River and into the Trees, in 1950. No, it was more than a comeback. The Old Man and the Sea became a Book of the Month Club selection in the United States, the precursor to the “book club,” and it catapulted Hemingway’s fame. In May 1953, it was named a Pulitzer Prize winner, and in October 1954, it was specifically cited as the work that helped him win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In terms of plot, The Old Man and the Sea is an extremely simple work. It tells the story of Santiago, an unlucky fisherman who goes out to sea again after eighty-four days without catching a single fish, when his line finally catches a huge marlin, and after two days and two nights of fighting, Santiago manages to catch the marlin on the third day and tie it to the side of a carving boat, only to be attacked by a shark and return home with a skeletonized marlin.
Why does such a simple story continue to captivate people? We can find clues, among other things, in Hemingway’s own words. In an interview with Time magazine in December 1954, Hemingway said.
“There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks, no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.”
“I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea, a real fish, and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough, they would mean many things.”
There is no doubt that The Old Man and the Sea is a simple and realistic story, but that doesn’t mean that the characters are one-dimensional. They are designed to “mean many things,” in Hemingway’s words, and the whole story has the potential to be interpreted as an allegory.
First of all, as the title “The Old Man and the Sea” suggests, the old man and the sea, the fish and the shark, are the most important of all. The old man is the one who fights in the sea, and the sea is the arena in which the old man fights. It could be said to be the world itself. The old man’s indomitable will to fight is summarized in the words “‘But man is not made to be defeated.’ (……) ‘Man can be destroyed, but he cannot be defeated’”. These universal themes are ones that any human being can relate to. As we read The Old Man and the Sea, we can easily recognize ourselves in the old man’s lonely struggle in the sea of life, lamenting, “I’m too old to beat a shark to death with a stick,” and then strengthening his resolve, “But as long as I have a paddle, a short stick, and a key handle, I’ll fight on.”
It’s not impossible to read The Old Man and the Sea from an unusual perspective. Hemingway claimed that he was trying to create “real” or “as-is” objects, but should we take him at his word? It’s hard to imagine that Hemingway, in describing the sharks frantically pouncing on a marlin, and the old man being mauled by them, didn’t once think of the hordes of critics who had attacked his previous book, Across the River and into the Trees, and the way he had been mauled by them. We’ll never know the truth, of course, but given Hemingway’s circumstances, such an interpretation isn’t entirely far-fetched. The ocean is a blank slate, the old man is a writer taking a risk and writing on a blank slate, the marlin is the big theme the writer has in mind, and the sharks are the critics who attack the writer’s finished work. It is also possible to imagine the author as an old man who, although the sharks have taken all of his marlin and returned empty-handed, is undeterred by the image of the old man sleeping soundly and planning his next fishing trip with the boy.
The Old Man and the Sea is also an ode to friendship, as evidenced by the fact that the old man is always with the boy, whether the boy is present or not. What’s unusual is that it’s a friendship that transcends age and species. First and foremost is the friendship between the boy Manolin and the old man. Manolin is the old man’s greatest support, taking care of him even when he can’t get on the boat, and is the first to greet and worry about him when he returns. It would seem that being a fisherman is what keeps the old man alive, but according to the old man, it’s not. Surprisingly, the old man says “Fishing is what kills me, but it’s also what keeps me alive, and I shouldn’t fool myself too much (……).” To the old man, the boy is his reason for being in the world.
But Manolin isn’t the only one of the old man’s friends. In the sea, the old man’s best friend is a flying fish, and it is said that the marlin he fought for two days and two nights to capture is also his friend. The old man looks at the halved marlin and says, “I wish I had cut off his snout and fought them, (……) it would have been a great weapon if I could have tied it tightly to the head of the paddle. Then we could have fought them together,” and he has a pleasant fantasy of defeating the shark, working in tandem with the marlin he had just fought. There’s more. Almost at the harbor, the old man sometimes says that “the wind is our friend” and “that great ocean” and “and the bed” are also friends. He praises his friendship with matter, saying, “The bed is my friend, all I need is a bed, (……) it’s very nice to lie down, it’s very comfortable to lie down, (……) I never realized how comfortable a bed is until now.” Indeed, it is a friendship that is so broad and multifaceted.
The Old Man and the Sea can also be read as a story about one man’s “defining moment” in life, as the fight with the marlin is the old man’s chance to prove his existence as a “salao”. As the old man faces off alone with a giant marlin, some five-and-a-half meters long, he says “’I told her I was a strange old man,’ (……) ‘Now it’s time to prove it.’” The moment has come for the old man to prove that he is different from the other fishermen, that he is “weird” and that luck hasn’t run out on him yet.
But it seems that this is not the first time the old man has faced such a moment of existential proof. Hemingway writes
“The fact that he had already proved it a thousand times meant nothing. Now he was about to prove it again. Every moment was new, and when he proved it, he didn’t think of the past at all.”
Even if you painstakingly succeed in proving existence this time, it will soon be invalidated, just like all the others before it. But that doesn’t mean we can give up on proof of existence. That would be the end of your career as a fisherman. But a single mistake would send the marlin scurrying away, so that single proof of existence actually requires a lot of decisive moments. To exaggerate a bit, for the old man, every moment is a defining moment. In fact, for two days and two nights, the old man holds the fishing line tightly in one hand while he does everything else with his other hand. For him, there is no such thing as a momentary lapse in concentration.
“The Old Man and the Sea” is also a baseball story in which the old man starts at ‘home,’ passes through ‘first base,’ where he fights a navigational battle, ‘second base,’ where he fights a marlin, and ‘third base,’ where he fights a shark, and somehow makes it back to ‘home’ safely; a story that constantly questions the nature of ‘luck,’ which ‘comes in many guises,’ not simply in the form of a ‘big catch’ that pays the bills, It can also be read as a religious allegory, in that Santiago’s groans are likened to those of Jesus being crucified, and the way he climbs the hill with the mast on his shoulders recalls Jesus climbing the hill of Golgotha with his cross. In fact, no matter how you read it, the structural coherence of “The Old Man and the Sea” is not easily broken, which is a testament to the care with which it is written.
It’s amazing that such a short and simple story can be read in so many different ways. But what’s even more surprising is that even when you reread the story with all of these interpretations in mind, The Old Man and the Sea remains a very realistic tale of a fisherman and the sea, in which an old man goes out to sea, fights, and returns. By the time you close the book, the many symbols that have been deployed have sunk deep into the calm surface of the old man’s sleep. It feels as if the book has collapsed under the weight of its own efforts to show us a “real” old man and a “real” sea, without claiming any symbols.
