THE OLD MAN
AND THE SEA
Ernest Hemingway
Contributors: Jesse Lichtenstein, David Hopson, Patrick Flanagan, Sarah Friedberg
Note: This SparkNote uses the Scribner Paperback Fiction edition of The Old Man
and the Sea. Other editions may vary slightly.
Copyright © 2002 by SparkNotes LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in
any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher.
SPARKNOTES is a registered trademark of SparkNotes LLC.
This edition published by Spark Publishing
Spark Publishing
A Division of SparkNotes LLC
76 9th Avenue, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10011
ISBN 1-4014-0418-9
Text design by Rhea Braunstein
Text composition by Jackson Typesetting
Printed and bound in the United States of America
01 02 03 04 05 SN 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
RRD-C
www.sparknotes.com
INTRODUCTION
STOPPING TO BUY SPARKNOTES ON A SNOWY EVENING
Whose words these are you think you know.
Your paper’s due tomorrow, though;
We’re glad to see you stopping here
To get some help before you go.
Lost your course? You’ll find it here.
Face tests and essays without fear.
Between the words, good grades at stake:
Get great results throughout the year.
Once school bells caused your heart to quake
As teachers circled each mistake.
Use SparkNotes and no longer weep,
Ace every single test you take.
Yes, books are lovely, dark, and deep,
But only what you grasp you keep,
With hours to go before you sleep,
With hours to go before you sleep.
CONTENTS
CONTEXT 1
PLOT OVERVIEW 3
CHARACTER LIST 5
ANALYSIS OF MAJOR CHARACTERS 7
Santiago 7
Manolin 8
THEMES, MOTIFS, AND SYMBOLS 9
The Honor in Struggle, Defeat, and Death 9
Pride as the Source of Greatness and Determination 10
Crucifixion Imagery 11
Life from Death 12
The Lions on the Beach 12
The Marlin 13
The Shovel-Nosed Sharks 13
SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS 15
Day One 15
Day Two 18
Day Three 22
Day Four 26
Day Five 30
vi • Contents
CRITICAL READINGS 33
HEMINGWAY’S STYLE 37
IMPORTANT QUOTATIONS EXPLAINED 39
KEY FACTS 43
STUDY QUESTIONS AND ESSAY TOPICS 47
REVIEW AND RESOURCES 49
Quiz 49
Suggestions for Further Reading 54
CONTEXT
E rnest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, the
son of a doctor and a music teacher. He began his writing ca-
reer 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. Heming-
way 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 Fare-
well 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 aspir-
ing young writers to come.
After leaving Paris, Hemingway wrote on bullfighting, published
short stories and articles, covered the Spanish Civil War as a journal-
ist, and published his best-selling novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).
These pieces helped Hemingway build up the mythic breed of mascu-
linity 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 fish-
2 • The Old Man and the Sea
ermen. 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 very likely cinched the Nobel Prize for Hemingway in
1954, as it was cited for particular recognition by the Nobel Academy. It
would be 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 au-
tobiographical 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 feed-
ing 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
T he 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 pros-
perous 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 develop-
ments 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 an-
other 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 him 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
4 • The Old Man and the Sea
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 succes-
sive 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 day-
break, 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 fisher-
man 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 great-
est 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 expe-
dition. 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 fish-
ing 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 vil-
lagers to improve the old man’s impoverished conditions.
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
6 • The Old Man and the Sea
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 vil-
lage. 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.
ANALYSIS OF MAJOR CHARACTERS
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 catch-
ing 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 fisher-
man 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 fisherman and secures him the prized
companionship of the boy—he knows that he will never have to en-
dure such an epic struggle again.
Santiago’s pride is what enables him to endure, and it is perhaps en-
durance 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 there are only two
options: defeat or endurance until destruction; Santiago clearly chooses
the latter. His stoic determination is mythic, nearly Christ-like in pro-
portion. For three days, he holds fast to the line that links him to the fish,
8 • The Old Man and the Sea
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, as 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.
THEMES, MOTIFS, AND SYMBOLS
THEMES
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a liter-
ary work.
The Honor in Struggle, Defeat, and 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 de-
stroyed 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
10 • The Old Man and the Sea
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 Cienfugos” 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 and 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 oppo-
nent. 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, “Noth-
ing . . . 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 at-
tempt 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 mar-
lin 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.
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols • 11
Santiago’s pride also motivates his desire to transcend the destruc-
tive forces of nature. Throughout the novel, no matter how baleful his
circumstances become, the old man exhibits an unflagging determina-
tion to catch the marlin and bring it to shore. When the first shark ar-
rives, 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 knowl-
edge 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, or 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
12 • The Old Man and the Sea
the hill with his mast across his shoulders recalls Christ’s march toward
Calgary. 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, play-
ing, his dream suggests a harmony between the opposing forces—life
and death, love and hate, destruction and regeneration—of nature.
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols • 13
SYMBOLS
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or 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,” San-
tiago feels genuinely lucky to find himself matched against a creature
that brings out the best in him: his strength and courage, his love and
respect.
The Shovel-Nosed Sharks
The shovel-nosed sharks are little more than moving appetites who
thoughtlessly and gracelessly attack the marlin. As opponents for 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 destruc-
tive 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.
SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS
The Old Man and the Sea is a narrative without pauses, chapter breaks,
or other marked divisions. For ease of discussion, this SparkNote divides
the text into five sections that correspond to the five days that the narra-
tive spans.
DAY ONE
Summary
From Santiago’s return from the eighty-fourth consecutive day without
catching a fish to his dreams of lions on the beach
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
16 • The Old Man and the Sea
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 “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 fruit-
less 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
Day One • 17
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 be-
longs to a tradition of literary heroes whose superior qualities neces-
sitate 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 liv-
ing: 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 non-
existent 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 re-
counts? 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 play-
ing on the beaches of Africa and baseball’s immortal Joe DiMaggio.
18 • The Old Man and the Sea
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 circular-
ity. 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
Summary
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
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. San-
tiago 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 be-
yond her control. The old man drops his baited fishing lines to various
Day Two • 19
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 creature’s fila-
ments. 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, to 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,
20 • The Old Man and the Sea
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 in-
stance, 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 fisher-
men he passes on his way into the deep waters of the gulf, Santiago exer-
cises 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 impor-
tant 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 beauti-
ful 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 de-
manded (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
Day Two • 21
prized hard facts above all else. Metaphysical meditations and lofty phi-
losophizing 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 con-
crete 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 for-
gotten 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 re-
mains 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
22 • The Old Man and the Sea
that Santiago is convinced that his greatest adversary is, as he continu-
ally notes, a male, a fact that he could not possibly ascertain before even
seeing the fish.
DAY THREE
Summary
From Santiago’s encounter with the weary warbler to his decision to rest
after contemplating the night sky
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 under-
stand him, the old man tells the bird to stay and rest up before heading
toward shore. Just then the marlin surges, nearly pulling Santiago over-
board, 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
Day Three • 23
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 “un-
24 • The Old Man and the Sea
clear.” 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, intercon-
nected 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 ex-
tends 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 success-
fully 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
Day Three • 25
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 superla-
tive 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 be-
gins 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. Hav-
ing 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, San-
tiago 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 great-
ness and his glory” link the fish’s fate to Christ’s. Because Santiago de-
clares 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
26 • The Old Man and the Sea
attacking Santiago as well, the sense of alliance between the old man and
the fish becomes even more explicit.
DAY FOUR
Summary
From the marlin waking Santiago by jerking the line to Santiago’s return
to his shack
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
Day Four • 27
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 him-
self 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 fear-
less 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 can-
28 • The Old Man and the Sea
not 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 dark-
ness, 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 at-
tempt 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 fore. 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
Day Four • 29
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 mar-
lin 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 antici-
pates 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 suf-
fering, 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 com-
ments, “He hit [the shark] without hope but with resolution.” But with-
out hope Santiago has reason neither to fight the sharks nor to return
30 • The Old Man and the Sea
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. Poet 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
Summary
From Manolin bringing the old man coffee to the old man’s return to sleep
to dream, once again, about the lions
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 after-
noon 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 re-
Day Five • 31
united 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
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 ex-
perience, 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 Calgary. Even the position in which he col-
lapses 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.
CRITICAL READINGS
T he Old Man and the Sea is a story told so simply and precisely
that it invites the reader to fish (pardon the pun) for secondary
meaning. After the novella was published, Hemingway urged a
friend against such readings, insisting, “I tried to make a real old man, a
real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks.” Yet this seems rather
disingenuous, especially given the famous “iceberg principle” that
governed Hemingway’s writing for decades. (See “Hemingway’s Style”
below.)
The very simplicity of the story suggests that it is a parable meant
to illustrate a moral lesson. But the nature of the lesson is not obvious.
The Hemingway scholar Philip Young offers a compelling answer to
this question when he suggests that the novel is a parable, but one for
life itself, and thus readers who search for other allegorical meanings
inevitably reduce the grandeur of the text. But, of course, alternate read-
ings persist. Paraphrased below are several prominent interpretations of
symbolism and metaphor in The Old Man and the Sea.
THE WRITER’S STRUGGLE
Still reeling from the critical thrashing of his previous book, Across the
River and Into the Trees, Hemingway constructs an allegory about the
struggle of a writer who extends himself beyond all limits, only to have
the resulting work picked apart by critics. Placing the novella in the con-
text of Hemingway’s resentment toward his critics, the parallels become
quite obvious: the sharks are the critics; Santiago’s art is as lonely as the
writer’s; the marlin, magnificent and elusive and inextricably bound to
the man who hunts it, represents Art. Furthermore, Santiago is a former
champion who wants to be champion again—in 1952, Hemingway was
in the same position.
Hemingway seems to have believed that his writing exceeded his
critics’ ability to understand it. In an interview conducted after the pub-
lication of Across the River and Into the Trees, he claims to have gone “far
34 • The Old Man and the Sea
out.” More compelling evidence for this reading comes from the text
itself. Santiago is the consummate craftsman. As a writer might aspire
to do, he keeps his lines where he wants them “with precision.” In fact,
he keeps them “straighter than anyone did.” As the double meaning of
“line” links the writer and the fisherman, so does Hemingway’s descrip-
tion of Santiago’s line being thick as a “big pencil.”
A CHRISTIAN ALLEGORY
The Christian references in The Old Man and the Sea are inescapable.
Manolin sails with Santiago for forty days, which is the same amount
of time Christ was banished to the wilderness. Santiago’s trial with
the fish lasts for three days, a crucial number in Christian theology,
for it marks the Trinity as well as the interval between the death and
resurrection of Christ. The scars of Santiago’s trial—his cut hands,
for instance—unite him with the crucified Christ, as does his posture
when he returns to his village. Santiago reminds the reader of Christ as
he bears the mast upon his shoulders and, further, as he collapses with
his arms out and palms up in the pose of crucifixion. Moreover, one
could say that Santiago exhibits essential Christian traits of humility
and charity. Like Christ, he also undergoes a great trial and returns to
society having experienced something others cannot. And, like Christ,
the fisherman is a martyr of sorts.
The question is whether these accumulated symbols amount to
anything coherent. Viewing the novella through the lens of Christian
allegory is useful in that it provides a context for understanding some of
the work’s dominant themes. For example, by linking Santiago to Christ,
Hemingway strengthens the reader’s sense that a terrific and profound
triumph has come from the old man’s defeat.
RELIGION OF MAN
One critic, at least, sees The Old Man and the Sea as a religious allegory,
but a decidedly non-Christian one. The novella, in this view, is the
clearest expression of what Joseph Waldmeir refers to as Hemingway’s
“Religion of Man.” This is a religion without an afterlife, in which
spiritual completion is achieved through physical action. It is the cult
Critical Readings • 35
of manhood. If anything counts in this world, if anything has meaning
and moral significance, it is how one does whatever one does. This is
especially true of solitary individuals in life-and-death situations. One
must kill to live, one must die, and these actions have no otherworldly
importance. Their meaning resides in how they are enacted. Because
there is no eternal salvation, all meaning and purpose are derived from
earthly experience, from doing one’s deeds well and bravely and truly—
from being, in short, a Man.
Santiago acts bravely and truly, and kills like a Man, which gives
meaning and purpose to his struggle. The final, material outcome of the
struggle—that is, whether he returns home with the fish—becomes ir-
relevant. The fish, too, has acted well and bravely and truly. It has been a
brother to Santiago, and it has died like a Man (indeed, Hemingway tells
us the sex of the fish). There is thus meaning and purpose in the fish’s
death. This reinforces the male-dominated worldview that Hemingway
creates in the novella: it is no mistake that there are no notable female
characters in The Old Man and the Sea.
HEMINGWAY’S STYLE
I n his discussion of the prose style of The Old Man and the Sea in
Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Old Man and the Sea,
Malcolm Cowley notes that Hemingway “uses the oldest and short-
est words, the simplest constructions, but gives them a new value—as
if English were a strange language that he had studied or invented for
himself and was trying to write in its original purity.” Indeed, Heming-
way was a revolutionary writer. Following on the heels of American
novelists like Henry James and, even earlier, Herman Melville, to whom
Hemingway was inevitably compared as a writer of “fishermen stories,”
Hemingway stood out rather shockingly. Whereas those novelists fash-
ioned complex sentences to capture some of the most complex observa-
tions ever transcribed in English, Hemingway felt sure that he could do
the same using concise everyday speech.
He developed and prided himself on a philosophy of writing that
he termed “the iceberg principle,” which essentially explains the air of
strangeness and mystery to which Cowley alludes. In a 1958 interview
in The Paris Review, Hemingway described this style of writing in the
following terms:
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-
eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you
know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is
the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he
does not know it then there is a hole in the story.
Hemingway went on to say that in The Old Man and the Sea
I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary . . . I’ve seen the
marlin mate and know about that. So I leave that out. I’ve seen
a school (or pod) of more than fifty sperm whales in that same
stretch of water and once harpooned one nearly sixty feet in length
and lost him. So I left that out. All the stories I know from the
38 • The Old Man and the Sea
fishing village I leave out. But the knowledge is what makes the
underwater part of the iceberg.
Certainly, there are moments when the reader feels the suggestion
of vast meaning beneath Hemingway’s few, spare words. Santiago’s
beautiful and elusive memory of the lions playing on the beach suggests
another world and another time, while his unexpected gratitude that
man does “not have to try to kill the stars” signals a profound inner life
of which the reader has only a mere glimpse. But there are moments
when this style feels hollow rather than spare, when Santiago’s words
seem more like an imitation of Hemingway than a profound and in-
evitable reaction to circumstance. His cursing of the shark, for instance,
reads like a parody of Hemingway’s own swaggering (and adolescent)
masculinity: “Slide down a mile deep. Go see your friend, or maybe it’s
your mother.” In his posthumously published works, such moments of
near self-parody proliferate. Fortunately, in The Old Man and the Sea,
such slips are rare.
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 thing that is certain 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 rec-
ognizable 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 recog-
nizably “Hemingwayesque” world, but the lions here are at play and thus
suggest a time of youth and ease. They are also linked explicitly to Mano-
lin, 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
40 • The Old Man and the Sea
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, com-
pact 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, evoca-
tive 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 famil-
iar, 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 break-
ing 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.” Imag-
ine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought.
The moon runs away. . . . Then he was sorry for the great
Important Quotations Explained • 41
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 uni-
verse 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 look-
ing 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
42 • The Old Man and the Sea
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, tow-
ing 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 beau-
tiful, as opposed to the bold, senseless scavenging on the part of the sharks.
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 objec-
tively, that is, as they would appear to an outside observer. How-
ever, 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
44 • The Old Man and the Sea
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. San-
tiago nearly passes out from exhaustion but is able to gather 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 his 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
Key Facts • 45
FORESHADOWING
Santiago’s insistence that he will sail out farther than ever before
foreshadows his destruction; because the marlin is linked to San-
tiago, the marlin’s death foreshadows Santiago’s own destruction
by the sharks.
STUDY QUESTIONS AND ESSAY TOPICS
STUDY QUESTIONS
1. What is the role of the sea in The Old Man and the Sea?
The rich waters of the Gulf Stream provide a revolving cast of bit play-
ers—birds and beasts—that the old man observes and greets. Through
Santiago’s interactions with these figures, his character emerges. In fact,
Santiago is so connected to these waters, which he thinks of good-
humoredly as a sometimes fickle lover, that the sea acts almost like a
lens through which the reader views his character. Santiago’s interaction
with the weary warbler, for instance, shows not only his kindness but
also, as he thinks about the hawks that will inevitably hunt the tiny bird,
a philosophy that dominates and structures his life. His strength, resolve,
and pride are measured in terms of how far out into the gulf he sails.
The sea also provides glimpses of the depth of Santiago’s knowledge: in
his comments about the wind, the current, and the friction of the water
reside an entire lifetime of experience, skill, and dedication. When, at the
end of the novella, Manolin states that he still has much to learn from
the old man, it seems an expression of the obvious.
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.
At first, Santiago’s plight seems rather hopeless. He has gone eighty-four
days without catching a fish, and he is the laughingstock of his small vil-
lage. Regardless of his past, the old man determines to change his luck
and sail out farther than he or the other fishermen ever have before. His
commitment to sailing out to where the big fish are testifies to the depth of
his pride. Later, after the sharks have destroyed his prize marlin, Santiago
chastises himself for his hubris, claiming that it has ruined both the marlin
and himself. Yet, Santiago’s pride also enables him to achieve what he oth-
erwise would not. Not until he meets and battles the marlin are his skills
48 • The Old Man and the Sea
as a fisherman truly put to the test. In other words, the pride that leads to
the destruction of his quarry also helps him earn the deeper respect of the
village fisherman and secures him the prized companionship of the boy.
3. Discuss religious symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea. To what effect does
Hemingway employ such images?
Christian symbolism, especially images that refer to the crucifixion of
Christ, is present throughout The Old Man and the Sea. During the old
man’s battle with the marlin, his palms are cut by his fishing cable. Given
Santiago’s suffering and willingness to sacrifice his life, the wounds are
suggestive of Christ’s stigmata, and Hemingway goes on to portray the old
man as a Christ-like martyr. As soon as the sharks arrive, Santiago makes a
noise one would make “feeling the nail go through his hands and into the
wood.” And the old man’s struggle up the hill to his village with his mast
across his shoulders is evocative of Christ’s march toward Calgary. Even
the position in which Santiago collapses on his bed—he lies face down
with his arms out straight and the palms of his hands up—brings to mind
the image of Christ on the cross. Hemingway employs these images in
order to link Santiago to Christ, who exemplified transcendence by turn-
ing loss into gain, defeat into triumph, and even death into life.
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?
REVIEW AND RESOURCES
QUIZ
1. When the novella opens, how long has it been since Santiago last
caught a fish?
A. 40 days
B. 84 days
C. 87 days
D. 120 days
2. Manolin’s parents refuse to let the boy fish with the old man be-
cause they believe Santiago is salao. How does Hemingway translate
this word?
A. “Crazy”
B. “Selfish”
C. “Washed up”
D. “The worst form of unlucky”
3. How does Hemingway describe Santiago’s eyes?
A. They are full of pain
B. They are blank with defeat
C. They betray the weariness of his soul
D. They are the color of the sea
4. What kind of reception does Santiago receive at the terrace café?
A. The fishermen regard him as a hero
B. Most of the fishermen mock him
C. The successful fishermen offer him a portion of their day’s catch
D. The younger fishermen pretend that the old man doesn’t exist
5. Who is Santiago’s hero?
A. Harry Truman
B. Joe DiMaggio
C. Dick Sisler
D. Fidel Castro
50 • The Old Man and the Sea
6. What hangs on the wall of the old man’s shack?
A. A photograph of his wife
B. The latest baseball scores
C. A mounted fish
D. Pictures
7. On the night before he promises Manolin to go “far out” to sea, of
what does Santiago dream?
A. A great storm
B. A beautiful woman
C. Lions on the beach
D. A wrestling match
8. Why does Santiago not let his lines drift like the other fishermen?
A. He is a stubborn man who prefers the old-fashioned way
of fishing
B. He believes it is imprecise, and he strives always to be exact
C. It is dangerous, as he might become tangled with another boat
D. He is no longer young or strong enough to control a drifting line
9. What kind of fish does Santiago first catch?
A. A tuna
B. A marlin
C. A shrimp
D. A Portuguese man-of-war
10. How does the old man know immediately the size of the great mar-
lin he has caught?
A. Soon after taking the bait, the fish jumps into the air, showing
itself to the old man
B. Santiago has encountered this fish before as a younger man
C. He pulls and pulls on the line and nothing happens
D. He doesn’t know the size of the fish until after the sharks have
attacked it
Review and Resources • 51
11. During his great struggle with the marlin, what does Santiago wish
repeatedly?
A. He wishes he were younger
B. He wishes for better equipment
C. He wishes that the fishermen who mocked him earlier were pres-
ent to witness his victory
D. He wishes that the boy, Manolin, were with him
12. In what year was The Old Man and the Sea published?
A. 1950
B. 1951
C. 1952
D. 1953
13. As his first full day of fighting with the fish wears on, what does
Santiago begin to think about his adversary?
A. He praises the fish because it promises to bring a wonderful
price at market
B. He considers that he and the marlin are brothers, joined by the
fact that they both ventured far out beyond all people and dangers in
the water
C. He detests the fish for its vigor and vitality
D. He believes the fish is a test of his worth, sent to him by God
14. What does the weary warbler that lands on Santiago’s fishing line
make the old man think of?
A. The probability that he, like the bird, will never make it back
to land
B. The predatory hawks that await the bird’s arrival near land
C. The hidden strength of the weak
D. The beauty of the natural world
15. What happens to make Santiago curse the treachery of his
own body?
A. He gets seasick
B. He has diarrhea
C. His hand cramps
D. He needs to sleep
52 • The Old Man and the Sea
16. In order to help himself catch the fish, what does Santiago do?
A. He promises to pay more attention to Manolin upon his return
B. He decides to recite ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers
C. He lightens the boat by throwing all unnecessary weight over-
board
D. He ties the skiff to a buoy so that the fish cannot pull it farther
out to sea
17. The great Joe DiMaggio suffers from what affliction?
A. A bone spur
B. Alcoholism
C. A ruined knee
D. Failing eyesight
18. To give himself confidence, Santiago remembers his contest with
“the great negro of Cienfuegos.” At what sport did the old man beat
this challenger?
A. Fencing
B. Tennis
C. Arm wrestling
D. Boxing
19. Why does the thought of selling the fish’s meat disappoint the
old man?
A. He knows people will cook the marlin, but it is best eaten raw
B. Market prices are low, and Santiago will get only a fraction of
what the fish is worth
C. Because marlin has an unpleasant taste, Santiago wishes he
caught something that made for better eating, like a shark
D. The people who will eat the meat are unworthy
20. What does the old man remove and eat from the belly of a dolphin?
A. Shrimp
B. Flying fish
C. Seaweed
D. Piranha
Review and Resources • 53
21. How does Santiago finally kill the marlin?
A. He harpoons it through the heart
B. He stabs it between the eyes
C. He lashes it to the inside of the boat
D. He bashes its head with his club
22. How long does it take for the sharks to arrive and attack the mar-
lin?
A. Ten minutes
B. One hour
C. Six hours
D. A full day
23. After the shark attack, Santiago reflects that destruction is inevi-
table. How does he articulate this philosophy?
A. The world is such an inhospitable place that no death should be
mourned
B. Out, out, brief candle!
C. Even the worthiest opponents must fall
D. Everything in the world kills everything else in some way
24. What happens upon the old man’s return to his fishing village?
A. Manolin promises to sail with him
B. The fishermen mock Santiago for the folly of sailing out so far
C. Tourists ask the old man to recount his adventures
D. A statue is erected in his honor
25. The old man remembers that once, when he killed a female marlin,
the male marlin
A. Bit the tail off the female
B. Returned with a posse of marlins seeking revenge
C. Made a sound like there were nails being driven through his fins
D. Swam alongside the boat as though in mourning
Answer Key:
1: B; 2: D; 3: D; 4: B; 5: B; 6: D; 7: C; 8: B; 9: A; 10: C; 11: D; 12: C; 13: B; 14: B; 15:
C; 16: B; 17: A; 18: C; 19: D; 20: B; 21: A; 22: B; 23: D; 24: A; 25: D
54 • The Old Man and the Sea
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1972.
Brenner, Gerry. The Old Man and the Sea: Story of a Common Man.
Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991.
Hurley, C. Harold, ed. Hemingway’s Debt to Baseball in The Old Man
and the Sea: A Collection of Critical Readings. Lewiston, New York:
E. Mellen Press, 1992.
———. “Just ‘a Boy’ or ‘Already a Man’?: Manolin’s Age in The Old Man
and the Sea,” The Hemingway Review 10, no. 2. 95–101.
Jobes, Katharine T., comp. Twentieth-Century Interpretations of The Old
Man and the Sea: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs,
New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
Morton, Bruce. “Santiago’s Apprenticeship: A Source for The Old Man
and the Sea,” The Hemingway Review 2, no. 2. 52–55
Waldmeir, Joseph J. and Frederick J. Svoboda, eds. Hemingway : Up in
Michigan Perspectives. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press,
1995.
Weeks, Robert P. Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962.
Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway. Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1961.
SPARKNOTES IN PRINT
1984, George Orwell
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
Animal Farm, George Orwell
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Beowulf, Anonymous
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Crucible, Arthur Miller
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
The Iliad, Homer
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Odyssey, Homer
The Oedipus Trilogy: Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Oedipus at
Colonus, Sophocles
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Separate Peace, John Knowles
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
Dante’s Inferno, Dante Alighieri
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare
King Lear, William Shakespeare
Macbeth, William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare
Othello, William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
The Tempest, William Shakespeare