Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” is a masterpiece of human endurance and challenge. This review explores its depth.
Hemingway’s Greatest Masterpiece
“The Old Man and the Sea is a masterpiece that earned Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize (1953) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1954) in his later years, and is considered his greatest work. The Swedish Academy made special mention of it in their decision on the Nobel Prize, saying that it was “a work of powerful yet elegant style, and the work of a master who has demonstrated the pinnacle of modern narrative technique”. Clifton Fadiman, a prominent American critic, once said, “Hemingway’s literature is 50 short stories,” referring to “The Old Man and the Sea” and the 49 original short stories published in 1938. This means that the essence of Hemingway’s literature is short stories.
The life of Hemingway
Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago. His father was a doctor who loved to hunt and fish, and his mother was a housewife who was deeply interested in art and music. Hemingway had a strong affection for his father, who taught him how to hunt and fish, but he felt a strong sense of resistance from his mother, who forced him to play the cello, which he had no interest in. It was because of this family environment that he entered the job market immediately after graduating from high school. Throughout Hemingway’s works, there are frequent references to his father and longing for him, but there are no references to his mother, which is unusual. In particular, his father committed suicide by shooting himself when Hemingway was 29, giving him a lifelong obsession with death.
After graduating from high school in 1917, he began his career as a journalist by getting a job at The Star, a leading newspaper in Kansas City, thanks to his experience editing school newspapers and his excellent writing skills. He soon tried to enlist in World War I, but was denied due to poor eyesight, so he entered the war as an agent of the American Red Cross. While working as an ambulance driver in Italy, he was injured on the Austrian-Italian front and was transferred to Milan at the age of less than 19. There he fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, a Red Cross nurse, but they never married. He later wrote “A Farewell to Arms” based on this experience.
After recovering from his injury, Hemingway returned to the United States and worked as a creative writer and journalist. In 1921, he married Hadley Richardson and went to France as a correspondent for the Toronto Star Weekly. In Paris, he began to take a serious literary course while socializing with American writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. The experience is well described in A Moveable Feast, published posthumously. In 1926, he divorced his first wife and remarried Pauline Pfeiffer, and whenever he met a new woman, he repeated the process of divorcing his current wife and remarrying the woman he had been seeing. He married four women in this way, and the first three women broke up with him after experiencing conflicts due to his macho temperament, but the last woman, Mary Welsh, remained by his side for 17 years until his death with an obedient and patient attitude. The main reasons for the divorces of his former wives were Hemingway’s selfish attitude and his affair with another woman. Hemingway, who became famous as a writer in the 1920s, solidified his image as a strong and courageous macho through his hobbies such as bullfighting, fishing and hunting, as well as through his travels. He also fought in the Spanish Civil War and World War II, cementing his reputation as a brave warrior.
Hemingway, who had already fallen in love with Spain and traveled extensively in the country in the 1920s and 1930s, raised money for those trying to defend the Republic when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 and visited Spain four times as a correspondent or traveler. It was during this time that he met Martha Gellhorn, a journalist who would become his third wife. She was the model for the heroine Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the novel is dedicated to her.
After marrying Martha, Hemingway bought the Finca Bahia farm near Havana, Cuba, and settled there. While living in Cuba, he and his wife traveled to China to cover the Japanese invasion of China, engaged in espionage against Germany, and were sent to Europe as journalists to participate in the Normandy operation and the liberation of Paris. He was a journalist, but he fought bravely in battle as well as a soldier, and he was actually very active in military affairs and guerrilla activities, especially in intelligence gathering. After the war, Hemingway returned to his home in Cuba, where he married his fourth wife, Mary, after his third marriage failed. After the publication of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” in 1940, he failed to produce any significant works, and there were rumors that his writing career was over. However, he published “The Old Man and the Sea” in 1952, which immediately dispelled those negative reviews.
Hemingway’s writing career was a roller coaster of success and failure. In the 1920s, he established his reputation as a modernist writer with his outstanding short stories and novels such as A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, but in the 1930s he wrote a mediocre novel called To Have and Have Not, which was harshly criticized by critics as a third-rate novel. However, he redeemed his reputation overnight with the publication of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” in the early 1940s. However, the full-length novel “Across the River and Into the Trees”, published in the late 1940s, was considered a more mediocre work than “To Have and Have Not”, and some people even said that Hemingway’s career was over. However, at this time he published “The Old Man and the Sea”, which won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. Then he began a period of failure, publishing an ordinary non-fiction book called “The Dangerous Summer” in 1960.
Hemingway was forced to leave the Finca Vigia plantation due to the Cuban Revolution in 1960, and returned to the United States to devote himself to writing his final masterpiece. Looking back on his past of repeated failures and successes, he spurred himself on to write a masterpiece that would sum up his literary career. Critics who disparage Hemingway’s literature have diagnosed his literature as “all action, no thought”. They have also harshly criticized Hemingway’s major characters, including Frederic Henry in “A Farewell to Arms,” Jake Barnes in “The Sun Also Rises,” and Robert Jordan in “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” for failing to grow up with age. However, in his last novel, “The Old Man and the Sea,” the actions and thoughts of the protagonist, the old man Santiago, are so well blended that the next 60 years of Hemingway’s literary career were expected to produce a great masterpiece.
This expectation was a great pressure for Hemingway. He was plagued by severe anxiety and depression, with the obsessive compulsion to write a masterpiece that would immediately dispel the bad reviews of the critics and be accepted by everyone, and the frustration of not being able to achieve that. A normal person would have been satisfied with what he’d accomplished so far and would have been able to retire, but Hemingway couldn’t do that. The myth of Hemingway, the indomitable, brave man that he had created throughout his life in the media, in magazines, and on the news, would not allow it. This took a tremendous toll on him, causing him to have a nervous breakdown and suffer from bipolar paranoia. He told people around him that the FBI was listening and following him, and he suspected that everyone around him had been recruited by the FBI to report on his every move. He was even worried that he would not be able to pay the IRS tax bill on time because he did not have enough money in his bank account (he left his wife Mary $1.4 million, an enormous amount of money that should be considered the assets of a banker rather than a writer), and he accused his obedient wife Mary of being on their side and not his, and he cursed her.
After two psychiatric hospitalizations, in the fall of 1960 and spring of 1961, and more than ten sessions of electroshock therapy, Hemingway returned to his home in Ketchum, Idaho, two days after failing to overcome his illness and committing suicide by shooting himself in the mouth with a shotgun on July 2, 1961. His body was buried in Ketchum, and the monument erected nearby bears the following inscription. “He loved fall more than anything. The yellow leaves of the elm forest, the leaves drifting down the trout stream, and the blue, windless sky beyond the hill. Now he is forever one with those landscapes.”
Background of the work ‘The Old Man and the Sea’
“The Old Man and the Sea was a work Hemingway had been thinking about for a long time. In the April 1936 issue of Esquire, Hemingway published an article with an acquaintance on “The Pleasures of Fishing” in the Gulf of Mexico. In it, he told a story he had heard from a Cuban fishing enthusiast named Carlos. The story was about an old man who had been fishing for many years.
An old man fishing in a small boat in the Gulf near Cabana caught a huge marlin. Two days later, fellow fishermen found him 60 miles to the east with the marlin still tied to the boat. The marlin was more than half eaten, but the remaining portion weighed 800 pounds. The old man caught the fish after a two-day struggle, but a school of sharks attacked and tore into his flesh. When his fellow fishermen found him, he was crying on the boat, in a state of shock over the loss of the fish. The sharks were still circling him.
This story was deeply rooted in Hemingway’s mind, and three years later, in 1939, he wrote to Max Perkins, an editor at Scribner’s. He wrote that he planned to write the story as a novel and that he was going out every day to the sea off Cuba to do field research with Carlos, a Cuban fisherman, in his small boat. The Old Man and the Sea” was supposed to be published around 1940, but was delayed because Hemingway was writing “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” which dealt with the Spanish Civil War. He finally began writing in January 1951 and finished it in eight weeks. He then read it over 200 times before publishing it, carefully polishing the sentences. It was published 15 years after Esquire published a story about an elderly Cuban man (whose real name was Manuel Ulibarri Montespan).
There is another episode related to the publication of “The Old Man and the Sea”. This work was published as a special issue of Life on September 1, 1952, and the entire magazine was filled with this novel alone. The novel caused an international sensation upon its publication, and the magazine sold a whopping 5.32 million copies. At the time, Life took a huge risk by filling an entire issue with just one of Hemingway’s novels. This was because Hemingway’s last novel, Across the River and Into the Trees, was considered a failure, and many critics considered Hemingway to be a writer past his prime. To prevent these critics from bad-mouthing the book, Life sent a galley of The Old Man and the Sea to about 600 prominent people in the United States and Europe to get their opinions. And he asked each of them to maintain security. In the summer of 1952, the Tokyo office of Life magazine visited novelist James Michener, who was then serving on the front lines in Korea. Michener read the manuscript in one sitting and, overcome with the excitement of having stumbled upon a masterpiece, went for a walk in the Korean summer night to calm down. And when I came back, I wrote a letter of recommendation saying that as a writer I was infinitely happy that the master of the literary world had again written a work worthy of his status, and this letter of recommendation was published in a full-page advertisement in Life.
“The Old Man and the Sea was first published as a book by Scribner on September 8, 1952, ten days after it appeared in the magazine. The first printing was 50,000 copies and it became an international bestseller.
The novel’s protagonist, Santiago, is a Spanish version of Saint James. James is the patron saint of Spain and was a fisherman before becoming a disciple of Christ. For this reason, Santiago is sometimes read as an allegory of Christ. For example, Christ and Santiago are both fishermen and moral teachers. Fish is called “ichthys” in Greek, which is a combination of the first letters of the Greek expression for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior”. In this way, Christ, the fish and the fisherman are one and the same. The 84 days that Santiago suffered at sea are similar to the 40 days that Christ spent in the wilderness, and the three days that he wrestled with the fish at sea are similar to the three days that Christ suffered on the cross. Just as Christ’s hands were pierced by the nails, Santiago’s hands were torn by the fishing line, and just as Christ was whipped on his back before going to Calvary, Santiago’s back was torn by the fishing line. In addition, Santiago suffers from a severe headache, similar to the pain suffered by Christ on the cross. The scene of Santiago returning to the harbor and carrying the mast back to the hut is similar to the scene of Christ carrying the cross to Calvary. In addition, the posture of Santiago lying on the bed in the hut is similar to the posture of Christ hanging on the cross.
The short stories other than “The Old Man and the Sea” were selected from those Hemingway said he considered his representative short stories in the preface to “The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories” (1938). In his preface, he listed “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “A Clean, Well-Lit Place,” and “The Light of the World” as representative short stories. In addition to these five, I have included “Indian Camp” and “The Killers” in this book. I chose these two short stories because I believe they will help readers understand the author’s life and his theories on short stories. Looking at the publication history, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” was first published in Cosmopolitan in September 1936, and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was first published in Esquire in August 1936 and then reprinted in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. “Hills Like White Elephants” first appeared in Transition in August 1927 and was reprinted in the anthology Men Without Women (1927) along with “The Killers,” which appeared in the March 1927 issue of Scribner’s Magazine. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” appeared in the March 1933 issue of Scribner’s Magazine and was included in the short story collection Winner Take Nothing (1933). “Indian Camp” appeared in the April 1924 issue of the Transatlantic Review and was later included in the collection In Our Time (1925). The Light of the World” was not published in the magazine, but was first included in the collection “Nothing to the Victor.
Commentary on ‘The Old Man and the Sea’
The most important thing in reading a novel is the story, and “The Old Man and the Sea” is a great story that makes you feel as if you are really there. However, the more excellent a work is, the more you discover aspects that are a plus-alpha to the story, which are the unexpressed meanings or symbols. Hemingway said, “There is no good novel that does not have some subtle symbolism,” and that symbolism is found in abundance in The Old Man and the Sea. So how does Hemingway define symbolism specifically?
Hemingway made this remarkable remark about symbolism in his nonfiction book, Death in the Afternoon. “If a novelist knows very well what he is trying to write, he can leave out what he knows. If he has written really well, the reader will have a clear impression of it, as if it were explicitly stated, even though it has been deliberately omitted.” The movement of the iceberg is dignified because only one-eighth of it is above the water, while the rest is under the water. On the other hand, a writer who omits what he does not know leaves only blank spaces in his writing.
According to this definition, a symbol is something that the reader can understand as if it had been said, even though it has not been said. I mentioned earlier the similarity between Santiago and Christ, and although the story of Christ does not appear in this work, it is written in such a way that the reader of the novel has that impression.
Another symbol of “The Old Man and the Sea” is to see the fisherman as an artist at work. The artist goes out alone into the unconscious sea and tries to catch a big fish (the subject of the work) by hanging various baits in the deep abyss of the self. So the artist has caught what he thinks is a nice piece of meat (the artwork), but on the way back to port he is attacked by a school of sharks (the critics) because he has gone too far into the sea of the unconscious, and the artwork is left completely empty. This interpretation is even more plausible in light of the harsh reviews of the previous work, Across the River and Into the Trees.
Then what is the symbol of the lion, which is mentioned eleven times in the work? To better understand the image of the lion, we should read Hemingway’s short stories “The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” together. The former features a lion, while the latter replaces the lion with a leopard, and the lion specifically symbolizes Hemingway’s view of life. Hemingway defines a human being as will, pride, and patience. A person must have the patience to accept pain and loss, and even when such loss is inevitable, he or she must show courage in the face of adversity. Pride means that a person has demonstrated the maximum of his or her abilities in the given environment based on his or her character. Will is the attitude of accepting the adversities of life with determination, without falling into self-pity or sentimentality, whether in defeat or in victory. Santiago is a man who practices this philosophy. He is an old and poor man, but he is a true “human being”. Although his physical strength is past its prime, his patience and will remain. Even in the face of defeat, he fights to the end, and therefore he is a man who never loses. In this sense, the lion is a symbol of Santiago’s philosophy of life. There is also a scene where the boy Manolin considers the lion to be on the same level as him, and this reflects his desire for Manolin, who loves him, to become a lion-like figure, that is, a figure like Santiago himself.
Hemingway emphasized the importance of conveying symbols and emotions in writing, and to explain this more specifically, he talked about the difference between a novelist and a newspaper reporter. For example, let’s say a newspaper reporter and a novelist both witness a young girl’s car accident. The newspaper reporter does not have to actually witness the accident. If he wants to maintain objectivity, it is better for the reporter not to witness the accident. The necessary details can be obtained from the police officer’s report. On the other hand, a novelist “should convey something he really feels, not something he is supposed to feel or something he has been taught to feel. The essence of a novelist is to make the reader feel what he or she feels. Hemingway wrote novels based on this theory in the 1920s and 1930s, when he was writing many short stories. “Hills Like White Elephants” and “The Killers” are good examples.
I mentioned symbols earlier, and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” uses the symbol of “a clean, well-lit place” to express the human desire to transcend the dark, dirty, and futile aspects of life. However, Hemingway’s symbols don’t always work perfectly. As Hemingway himself revealed, “The Light of the World,” which he considered his masterpiece but which was harshly criticized by critics, does not work as a symbol. A white boxer named Steve Ketchel is described as symbolizing Jesus Christ, while a fat prostitute named Alice is described as symbolizing Mary Magdalene. Unlike the symbolism of “Santiago = Christ,” however, it is difficult for the reader to readily accept this symbolism. If you read “The Light of the World” and “The Old Man and the Sea” side by side, you will see how subtle and cunning the symbolism of the latter is.
The Old Man and the Sea” is the most famous line of the book, and it is also Hemingway’s philosophy: “Man is not born to be defeated. Man can be destroyed, but he cannot be defeated. Given that Santiago the old man is almost like Hemingway’s alter ego, we are left with these questions regarding the author’s suicide. “How can killing yourself be a way to avoid defeat?” Indian Camp is a work that answers that question. Nick (Hemingway as a child) visits an Indian village with his father, a doctor, and sees an Indian who has committed suicide in the village. He asks his father why people kill themselves. His father replies, “Perhaps they couldn’t bear to live.
It seems that even Hemingway could not stand life in his later years. In “The Old Man and the Sea,” he says, “Proving it a thousand times before was nothing. Now he had to prove it again. Each time was a new time, and when he made that kind of proof he did not think of the past.” Hemingway had written many good works before, but since he could not write them now, he thought he was no longer a writer and could not bear such a meaningless life.
Throughout his life, Hemingway, who had been involved in macho activities such as boxing, war, bullfighting, hunting, fishing, and women, had an almost obsessive preoccupation with violence and death. Having witnessed death as a child and being prepared to fight against it, Hemingway became even more obsessed with the subject after his father’s suicide, and he spent his entire life confronting death. This intense confrontation was a theme that ran throughout his work. As I mentioned earlier, “The Old Man and the Sea” contains various layers of symbolism. In this light, the translator sees Santiago as the god of death, Marlin as Hemingway in the depths of the sea, the hook that caught Marlin as obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the old man’s act of swimming in Marlin’s boat for two days in the deep sea as boxing, war, bullfighting, and suicide. I think it can also be read as Hemingway’s attempt to overcome death through fishing and women. At this point, the fishing line becomes the rope of confrontation and the thread of fate that connects death and Hemingway.
In “The Old Man and the Sea,” the marlin circles the boat and, realizing that he cannot beat the old man, leaps high into the air, tragically revealing his beautiful form. “The fish now seemed to foresee his death, and with a sudden burst of energy he leaped high into the air. Its enormous length and breadth, its tremendous power and beauty, were vividly revealed. It seemed to hang over the head of the old man standing on the ship. “While translating this part, the translator read Hemingway’s indomitable spirit of wanting to die first if he could not conquer death. In the East, there is a famous saying, “Saga Salbul Tal,” and wasn’t Hemingway’s suicide an example of the indomitable spirit? Hemingway’s youngest son, Gregory, said, “My father showed his courage by taking the only option left to him.
