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The Old Man and the Sea
Hemingway’s Old Man & The Sea, Destroyed But Not Defeated
I just finished The Old Man and the Sea, my second reading of the last novel by the Nobel Laureate, who took his life with a shotgun in 1959. I first read the story in my senior year 1962-1963 at Clover Park High School in Tacoma, Washington. I identified with the boy, Manolin back then. This time I identified with Santiago, the old man in the book. Hemingway influenced the generations that grew up reading his work. George Plimpton, the author of Paper Lion—if you’re like me you didn’t read Plimpton’s book but saw the movie with Alan Alda playing Plimpton—and editor of Paris Review, is one example. If you had one phrase to sum up the motivation of characters in any Hemingway book it would be “a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do”—I’m reminded of the circular reasoning of Gertrude Stein, “a rose is a rose…” For those of us growing up in the 1950s, Hemingway’s phrase was all too familiar. When we turned 18, we had to register for the draft or join one of the armed services. We began life with a duty and that sense of duty remained—at least for me.
Hemingway’s story is a parable that resembles the crucifixion of Christ. Hemingway drawing attention to Santiago hands and the unrelenting pain they both endure. After cutting his left hand when the fish suddenly jerks the line, Santiago says, “It is not bad. And pain does not matter to a man.” The fish like the cross weighs heavily on the old man’s back. “But four hours later the fish was still swimming steadily out to sea, towing the skiff, and the old man was still braced solidly with the line across his back.” Both men are aware, too, of the struggle that awaits them, knows that life will be a continuum of struggle to be followed by death. Santiago is at the end of his life and death is of no consequence to him. What is important is to continue doing what he has done all his life. Yet, Santiago by his view of the world, a man having to do what a man has to do, has sealed his own fate and is destined to his role in the ritual he’s enacting just as Christ’s life was likewise preordained.
In many ways the reader sees in the words of this his last novel, Hemingway rationalizing his view of the world in his old age. Santiago wants to die doing what he loves to do. Hemingway lacked an occupation that he could die doing at a level of excellence acceptable to him or his readers. In the boat by himself, Santiago battles the Sharks feeding on his great prize and he sees in this battle the natural struggle that is living. One real possibility is that he will lose the struggle and instead of being the predator, he becomes the prey. In some ways, Hemingway’s characters were greater in stature than their creator, who chose to take his own life. Santiago would no more consider suicide than he would consider not fighting the sharks with every ounce of life left in him.
The notion of predator and prey is sharply drawn in the story, too, when Santiago articulates that one fish feeds on another and that he feeds on the fish. The nature of life is that each living creature must feed off another in order to live. Humans at the top of the food chain are themselves prey to diseases, viruses, bacteria, and as carrion—in the wild—by scavengers and in the graveyard by insect larvae and then insects themselves, who continue the cycle by being consumed by higher order plants and animals. It’s a cycle of feeding that returns on itself. There is beauty in the symmetry reflected in the old man’s musings as he attempts to bring his catch back to the village. “Besides, he thought, everything kills everything else in some way.”
The old man’s quest is for the great fish that he hooks and manages to subdue half way through the tale. The conflict appears to be between fisherman and fish, but in reality, the conflict is the old man’s struggle to endure. The fish is symbolic of the struggle that is life and Santiago knows that he must consume himself to endure the struggle and prevail. He relates symbols of the struggle in his reverie of the arm wrestling match in Casablanca with the black man from Cienfuegos—on southern coast of Cuba on the Caribbean Sea, 250 km east from Havana, the strongest man on the docks. The match had stretched two days over the weekend, neither man wanting to relent. The black man would mount an all out effort to press Santiago arm to the table only to have his opponent rebound, and when everyone believed the match would end in a draw, Santiago launched and completed his successful attack to press his opponent’s arm to the table.
He was younger then and now here he is again being tested by other opponents. This time an older man, his body, calloused with age, is beginning to labor to do the bidding of its master. Santiago talks to his two hands as if they were separate from him, chiding the left for being the weaker of the two, complaining to both of their unwillingness to do his bidding—the left hand cramps on him and resists being opened—an eager spirit but a wanting body. “I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one’s own body.” During the battle with the sharks attacking his enormous fish lashed to the skiff because it is larger than the small boat, he realizes how badly his body is wanting. “He was stiff and sore now and his wounds and all of the strained parts of his body hurt with the cold of the night. ‘I hope I do not have to fight again,’ he thought.” But he knows there is more struggle in store.
The other major theme of this work is that the goal is not the point of life—as the narrative reveals, the goal is achieved and lost before the story completes. What remains is the quest and the struggle it entails, the battle between the old man and the enormous Marlin he has hooked that tows him out to sea and the sharks that attack his kill as he makes his way back to port. At this level, the story resembles the bullfight. The matador and bull are locked in this ritual of which the bull is completely ignorant. In Santiago’s words, “you were born to be a fisherman as the fish was born to be a fish.” The matador knows the outcome—the bull will die one way or the other. The bull can only do what nature has bred him to do, charge the matador and establish his dominance. The man has the advantage but is himself expected to perform and in his performance to demonstrate his dominance over this force of nature. How well the matador performs determines if he emerges a living or dead, hero or coward.
Hemingway’s fatalism is clearly articulated in this story as he describes the parts assigned to the fish and those he has been given: “His (the fish) choice had been to stay in the deep dark water far out beyond all snares and traps and treacheries. My choice was to go there to find him beyond all people…. Now we are joined together…. And no one to help either one of us.” The old man knows he is being tested in his struggle. The outcome is inconsequential only that he knows that he has performed well. The Greeks have a word for this. It’s areté, the most articulated value in Greek culture, which translated as "virtue," but actually means something closer to "reaching your highest human potential."
In Santiago’s world, the ocean is the arena, the sea and its creatures are the opponent—the only variable in the entire venue is Santiago. The large fish is compelled to do what eventually gets him caught on the old man’s hook, the ocean is oblivious of both man and fish, and the shark are conditioned to scavenge Santiago’s catch. The only variable in this entire scene is the old man. At any point in the story he has the option to give up and return to port, to allow the sharks to feed unchallenged on his catch—Santiago knows that the sharks will have their way and nothing he can do will stop them, yet he persists in fighting them until he is without means to fight. He looses his harpoon in the battle with the first attacking shark, then his knife after killing three more that follow.
Now weaponless he resorts to a club, an oar handle sawed off to about two and a half feet. With this he bludgeons the next two attacking sharks, sufficiently that they both break off their attack. Then, in a cathartic climax of frenzied feeding by a pack of sharks at midnight, “he clubbed at heads and heard the jaws chop and the shaking of the skiff as they took hold below. He clubbed desperately at what he could only feel and hear and he felt something seize the club and it was gone.” Still the old man continued to fight. “He jerked the tiller free and beat and chopped with it.” In the melee, he broke the tiller against the one remaining shark still feeding on the carcass. “He heard the tiller break and he lunged at the shark with the splintered butt…” and in the process killing the one last attacker.
There is a stream of conscientiousness, to the storytelling. You come to understand Santiago and what drives him by his compulsive conversation he engages with himself. You learn his dear wife has died, that he traveled to Africa as a young man. You learn that his dreams now are only about the lions he remembered as a young man in Africa coming down to the beach. You sense that the old man knows that he’s getting close to death though in the story there are brief acknowledgements. One is before the final battle with the fish: “Twice, though, he had felt faint and dizzy and that had worried him.” Another occurs in the aftermath of the battle with the last shark. “The old man could hardly breath now and he felt a strange taste in his mouth. It was coppery and sweet and he was afraid of it for a moment. But there was not much of it.”
He returns to port beaten by the forces of the sea, but not defeated. He dreams of returning to do battle again. This story resembles the catholic mass with Santiago acting the part of the priest, engaging in a prolonged soliloquy, in the course of which he promises to say sets of “Hail Marys” and “Our Fathers” if he is allowed to catch the Marlin. For such a short work, Hemingway managed to instill within it so many levels of meaning, the cumulative synthesis of a lifetime of experience. If you read this book as a young person, you should read it again as an old one, there is much the author has to say to both of you.
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