The Old Man and the Sea is a novel written by the American author Ernest Hemingway in
1951 in Cuba, and published in 1952. It was the last major work of fiction to be produced
by Hemingway and published in his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it centers upon
Santiago, an aging fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.
The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and was cited by
the Nobel Committee as contributing to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature
to Hemingway in 1954.
Plot summary The Old Man and the Sea is the story of a
battle between an old, experienced fisherman and a large marlin. The novel opens with the
explanation that the fisherman, who is named Santiago, has gone 84 days without catching
a fish. Santiago is considered "salao", the worst form of unluckiness. In fact, he is
so unlucky that his young apprentice, Manolin, has been forbidden by his parents to sail
with the old man and been ordered to fish with more successful fishermen. Still dedicated
to the old man, however, the boy visits Santiago's shack each night, hauling back his fishing
gear, getting him food and discussing American baseball and his favorite player Joe DiMaggio.
Santiago tells Manolin that on the next day, he will venture far out into the Gulf Stream,
north of Cuba in the Straits of Florida to fish, confident that his unlucky streak is
near its end. Thus on the eighty-fifth day, Santiago sets
out alone, taking his skiff far onto the Gulf Stream. He sets his lines and, by noon of
the first day, a big fish that he is sure is a marlin takes his bait. Unable to pull
in the great marlin, Santiago instead finds the fish pulling his skiff. Two days and two
nights pass in this manner, during which the old man bears the tension of the line with
his body. Though he is wounded by the struggle and in pain, Santiago expresses a compassionate
appreciation for his adversary, often referring to him as a brother. He also determines that
because of the fish's great dignity, no one will be worthy of eating the marlin. On the
third day of the ordeal, the fish begins to circle the skiff, indicating his tiredness
to the old man. Santiago, now completely worn out and almost in delirium, uses all the strength
he has left in him to pull the fish onto its side and stab the marlin with a harpoon, ending
the long battle between the old man and the tenacious fish. Santiago straps the marlin
to the side of his skiff and heads home, thinking about the high price the fish will bring him
at the market and how many people he will feed.
While Santiago continues his journey back to the shore, sharks are attracted to the
trail of blood left by the marlin in the water. The first, a great mako shark, Santiago kills
with his harpoon, losing that weapon in the process. He makes a new harpoon by strapping
his knife to the end of an oar to help ward off the next line of sharks; in total, five
sharks are slain and many others are driven away. But the sharks keep coming, and by nightfall
the sharks have almost devoured the marlin's entire carcass, leaving a skeleton consisting
mostly of its backbone, its tail and its head. Finally reaching the shore before dawn on
the next day, Santiago struggles on the way to his shack, carrying the heavy mast on his
shoulder. Once home, he slumps onto his bed and falls into a deep sleep.
A group of fishermen gather the next day around the boat where the fish's skeleton is still
attached. One of the fishermen measures it to be 18 feet from nose to tail. Tourists
at the nearby café mistakenly take it for a shark. Manolin, worried during the old man's
endeavor, cries upon finding him safe asleep. The boy brings him newspapers and coffee.
When the old man wakes, they promise to fish together once again. Upon his return to sleep,
Santiago dreams of his youth—of lions on an African beach.
Background and publication Written in 1951, and published in 1952, The
Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway's final work published during his lifetime. The book, dedicated
to Hemingway's literary editor Maxwell Perkins, was featured in Life magazine on September
1, 1952, and five million copies of the magazine were sold in two days. The Old Man and the
Sea also became a Book of the Month Club selection, and made Hemingway a celebrity. Published
in book form on September 1, 1952, the first edition print run was 50,000 copies. The illustrated
edition featured black and white illustrations by Charles Tunnicliffe and Raymond Sheppard.
The novel received the Pulitzer Prize in May, 1953, and was specifically cited when he was
awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. The success of The Old Man and the Sea made
Hemingway an international celebrity. The Old Man and the Sea is taught at schools around
the world and continues to earn foreign royalties.
Hemingway wanted to use the story of the old man, Santiago, to show the honor in struggle
and to draw biblical parallels to life in his modern world. Possibly based on the character
of Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway had initially planned to use Santiago's story, which became
The Old Man and the Sea, as part of an intimacy between mother and son and also the fact of
relationships that cover most of the book relate to the Bible, which he referred to
as "The Sea Book." Some aspects of it did appear in the posthumously published Islands
in the Stream. Hemingway mentions the real life experience of an old fisherman almost
identical to that of Santiago and his marlin in On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter.
Literary significance and criticism The Old Man and the Sea served to reinvigorate
Hemingway's literary reputation and prompted a reexamination of his entire body of work.
The novel was initially received with much popularity; it restored many readers' confidence
in Hemingway's capability as an author. Its publisher, Scribner's, on an early dust jacket,
called the novel a "new classic," and many critics favorably compared it with such works
as William Faulkner's "The Bear" and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.
Santiago as a Spaniard "'Eyes the Same Color of the Sea': Santiago's
Expatriation from Spain and Ethnic Otherness in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea" focuses
on the old man's national identity. Using baseball references, the article points out
that Santiago was at least 22 years old when he moved from Spain to Cuba. "Born in Spain’s
Canary Islands, Santiago moved to Cuba as a young man; this circumstance has a significant
impact on his social condition." Santiago was old enough to have a Spanish identity
when he immigrated, and the article examined how being a foreigner would influence his
life on the island. Because Santiago was too poor to move back to Spain—many Spaniards
moved to Cuba and then back to Spain at that time—he adopted Cuban culture like religious
ceremonies, Cuban Spanish, and fishing in skiffs in order to acculturate in the new
country. Gregorio Fuentes, who many critics believe
was an inspiration for Santiago, was a blue-eyed man born on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands.
After going to sea at age ten on ships that called in African ports, he migrated permanently
to Cuba when he was 22. After 82 years in Cuba, Fuentes attempted to reclaim his Spanish
citizenship in 2001. Religion as a motif
Joseph Waldmeir's essay "Confiteor Hominem: Ernest Hemingway's Religion of Man" is a favorable
critical reading of the novel—and one which has defined analytical considerations since.
Perhaps the most memorable claim therein is Waldmeir's answer to the question—What is
the book's message? "The answer assumes a third level on which
The Old Man and the Sea must be read—as a sort of allegorical commentary on all his
previous work, by means of which it may be established that the religious overtones of
The Old Man and the Sea are not peculiar to that book among Hemingway's works, and that
Hemingway has finally taken the decisive step in elevating what might be called his philosophy
of Manhood to the level of a religion." Waldmeir was one of the most prominent critics
to wholly consider the function of the novel's Christian imagery, made most evident through
Hemingway's obvious reference to the crucifixion of Christ following Santiago's sighting of
the sharks that reads: "‘Ay,′ he said aloud. There is no translation
for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling
the nail go through his hands and into the wood."
An unrealistic novel
One of the most outspoken critics of The Old Man and the Sea is Robert P. Weeks. His 1962
piece "Fakery in The Old Man and the Sea" presents his claim that the novel is a weak
and unexpected divergence from the typical, realistic Hemingway. In juxtaposing this novel
against Hemingway's previous works, Weeks contends:
"The difference, however, in the effectiveness with which Hemingway employs this characteristic
device in his best work and in The Old Man and the Sea is illuminating. The work of fiction
in which Hemingway devoted the most attention to natural objects, The Old Man and the Sea,
is pieced out with an extraordinary quantity of fakery, extraordinary because one would
expect to find no inexactness, no romanticizing of natural objects in a writer who loathed
W.H. Hudson, could not read Thoreau, deplored Melville's rhetoric in Moby Dick, and who
was himself criticized by other writers, notably Faulkner, for his devotion to the facts and
his unwillingness to 'invent.'" Some critics suggest "The Old Man and the
Sea" was Hemingway's reaction towards the criticism of his most recent work, Across
the River and into the Trees. The negative reviews for Across the River and into the
Trees distressed him, and may have been a catalyst to his writing of The Old Man and
the Sea. References
Sources
Further reading Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway. New York:
Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. ISBN 0-8166-0191-7. Jobes, Katharine T., ed.. Twentieth Century
Interpretations of The Old Man and the Sea. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
ISBN 0-13-633917-4. External links
Read Online at Classic Literature Hemingway Archives, John F. Kennedy Library
The Old Man and the Sea—slideshow by Life magazine
Rare, Unseen: Hemingway in Cuba—slideshow by Life magazine
"Hemingway's fisherman the Old Man of the Sea dies"—BBC News
"Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure: Cuba". PBS. Retrieved January 21, 2006.