Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea

Summary

The 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 prosperous 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 developments 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 another 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 Santiago 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 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 successive 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
daybreak, 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.
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
The Honor in Struggle, Defeat & 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 destroyed 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 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 Cienfuegos” 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 & 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 opponent. 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, “Nothing . . . 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 attempt 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 marlin 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. Santiago’s pride also motivates his desire to transcend the destructive forces of nature. Throughout the
novel, no matter how baleful his circumstances become, the old man exhibits an unflagging determination to
catch the marlin and bring it to shore. When the first shark arrives, 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 knowledge 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 are recurring structures, contrasts, and 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 the hill with his mast across
his shoulders recalls Christ’s march toward Calvary. 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.

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and 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,” Santiago feels genuinely lucky to find himself matched against a creature that
brings out the best in him: his strength, courage, love, and respect.

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, playing, his
dream suggests a harmony between the opposing forces—life and death, love and hate, destruction and
regeneration—of nature.

The Shovel-Nosed Sharks

The shovel-nosed sharks are little more than moving appetites that thoughtlessly and gracelessly attack the
marlin. As opponents of 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 destructive 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.