The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea

There is a scene in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, when after a shark has taken a big chunk about forty pounds off Santiago prize marlin catch, Santiago begin to doubt whether he should have gone out to sea and wishes that he had never hooked the fish and was alone in bed with his newspaper (103). Immediately after the Santiago says, “But man is not made for defeat a man can be destroyed but not defeated” (103).

The life of Ernest Hemingway intertwines to the novel The Old Man in the Sea in many different ways. For example late in Hemingway’s life he didn’t have the money to really live on his own so he ended up moving to Cuba like Santiago and buying a little shack he could stay in, Hemingway felt Santiago pain as a man. Long time between novels and his reputation as a great author on the line, Hemingway had prove himself, and Santiago also felt that he had to prove himself again as a fisherman. Santiago quest to catch a great fish is the author in an attempt to pull forth the great story from its depths. But Santiago great catch a ten foot marlin was torn apart by sharks and that symbolic if critics tearing apart The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway failed Marriages and rejection by a teenage girl also influenced the writing of this story.

The main character and the protagonist in the story was Santiago.” Santiago is an aged old Cuban man, a skilled fisherman by profession. His neck is wrinkled from the sun and his hand bear the scars of many fishing battles only his blue eyes remain bright and cheerful’’. By personality Santiago is brave, confident, and cheerful and determined, not letting anything in life rattle him. Even when he does not catch a single fish for eighty – four days, he past r...

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... eating the fish and leaving only the skeleton behind. The old man feeling tired and defeated, makes his way back home crushed with fatigue. My first impressions of Santiago are that he is old, weak and alone. Hemingway illustrates this through the opening sentence of the novel: “He was an old man who fished alone in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty – four days now without catching a single fish.” This suggests that the old man is an extremely unfortunate fisherman.

Hemingway’s vision of heroism and the ability to convay his own life events, and feelings onto the page is a requiring labor ephemeral ends. Facing adversity thought both his literature and real life events Hemingway makes himself and Santiago more of a human being rather than an author or a character. For example Santiago says “Man is not made for defeat…A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”