The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Author: Ernest Hemingway · 1952

Plot

Santiago is an old Cuban fisherman who has not caught a fish in eighty-four days. The village considers him salao — the worst kind of unlucky. The boy, Manolin, who has fished with him since the age of five and thinks of him as a second father, has been pulled off Santiago’s skiff by his own parents and sent to a luckier boat. Santiago sleeps alone in a shack with a single photograph of his dead wife turned to the wall because he can no longer bear to see it. He eats when the boy brings him food. He dreams, now, only of lions playing on African beaches he saw as a young man. “Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.”

On the eighty-fifth day he rows out alone before dawn, further into the Gulf Stream than the other boats go. By noon something enormous takes his bait. The line does not break but it also does not come up. Instead, the fish simply begins to swim — steadily, with unhurried power — towing the skiff out to sea. Santiago cannot see the fish. He can only hold the line across his shoulders, brace his bare feet against the boards, and be dragged.

The fish tows him all that first day, all night, all the next day. Santiago sleeps in snatches. His left hand cramps into a useless claw. The line cuts his right hand and his back. He eats a raw tuna he had caught earlier. He talks to his hands, to the birds, to the fish he still cannot see. “I wish I had the boy,” he says, over and over, a refrain. He says it because it is true and because saying it keeps him present.

At last the fish comes up. It is a marlin, a male, longer than the skiff — eighteen feet, maybe fifteen hundred pounds. Santiago sees it for the first time and the respect that had been building in him crystallizes into something close to love. “Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother.” He fights it for another day. He talks to it as to a peer: “Fish… I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.” He circles it in closer, closer, until, on the third day, with the last of his strength, he drives the harpoon into its heart.

The victory lasts an hour. The marlin is too large to haul aboard; he lashes it alongside and sets a line for Havana. Within an hour a mako shark comes up the trail of blood. Santiago kills it with the harpoon and the mako takes the harpoon with it into the dark. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” More sharks come. He kills them with the knife lashed to an oar. The knife snaps. He fights them with the club, with the broken tiller, with whatever he can lift. By nightfall they have stripped the marlin to head, spine, and tail. He sails into the Havana harbor past midnight, dragging the skeleton.

He stumbles up the hill with the mast across his shoulders — the novel’s plainest piece of symbolism, a man carrying his cross — falls once, lies with the mast on his back, gets up, makes his shack, sleeps face down on the newspaper of his bed. In the morning the other fishermen measure the skeleton at eighteen feet and fall silent. The boy finds Santiago, sees his cut hands, and cries. “The hell with luck. I’ll bring the luck with me.” He will fish with the old man again, whatever his parents say. In the last line Santiago is sleeping on his face. The boy sits by him. The old man is dreaming of the lions.

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What the Book Is About

Hemingway had spent twenty years being told he was finished. Across the River and into the Trees, published two years before, had been his worst-reviewed book. The critics had decided the old heavyweight was shot. He sat down and wrote a 27,000-word novella about an old man who catches a great fish, loses it, and survives. It won him the Pulitzer in 1953 and the Nobel in 1954. The Nobel citation named this book. It is his answer to the charge that he was done, and it is also — more importantly — the distilled form of the ethic he had spent his whole career inventing.

The ethic is in one sentence: “But man is not made for defeat… A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” This is not a triumphalist line. Santiago is destroyed — his hands are ruined, his prize is gone, his body is failing — and he knows it. The sentence distinguishes between what happens to the body and what happens to the spirit. The spirit is not defeated if you keep your code. The code in this book is what Hemingway had called, twenty-five years earlier, grace under pressure. You go out. You do the work. You face the fish. You face the sharks. You do not whine. You do not give up. You do not pretend you are better than you are. You admit when you went too far: “I ruined us both.” That is the whole curriculum.

The second argument is about brotherhood with what you kill. This is one of the strangest and most Christian of Hemingway’s late positions — strange because he was not a practicing Christian, Christian because the book is soaked in sacramental imagery. Santiago calls the marlin brother. He calls the fish and his two hands brothers: “There are three things that are brothers: the fish and my two hands.” He grieves the marlin when it is destroyed: “I’m sorry about it, fish. It makes everything wrong.” The sea is not an enemy. Nature is not an enemy. Even the sharks are only what they are; they scavenge because scavenging is their work. What the book rejects is the tourist’s view of nature as spectacle. Santiago is inside the natural order. He kills what he loves because that is the arrangement.

The third argument is about pride correctly sized. “He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride.” This is the psychological core of the book — a man who can be pitied, helped, fed by the boy, without collapse, because the pride that matters to him is internal and work-measured. He can wear a patched shirt and still be Santiago. He can be salao and still be Santiago. He does not need the village’s belief in him. He does need his own belief in himself, and he loses it only once, at the moment of full honesty: “I went out too far.”

The fourth argument is religious. Hemingway is deliberate about it. Santiago carries the mast up the hill. His palms bleed from the line. At the moment he first sees the sharks he says “Ay” — the sound he specifies is what a man might make “feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.” He is “not religious” but promises ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys. The marlin is stripped to bone, like a crucifixion after the body has been taken down. The book is a passion play. Its subject, though, is not salvation; its subject is endurance. Santiago does not rise. The boy takes his place at the side. The legend will continue.

The Cast

Santiago. The novel’s entire moral weight. An old man with ruined hands and Gulf-Stream eyes, keeping his balance against a universe that has stopped being polite to him. He is everything Hemingway admired: precise, proud without arrogance, tender toward the boy, rigorous with himself. He says “I wish I had the boy” nineteen times. He means: I am lonely, I am scared, I need another person. He never says this directly because a Hemingway protagonist doesn’t. The book’s technique is to hear him say it through the work-talk instead.

The boy, Manolin. Youth, love, continuity. He is the reason Santiago’s life makes sense. He brings the old man food, bait, company. At the end he cries openly. He decides, over his parents, that he will fish with Santiago again. “The hell with luck. I’ll bring the luck with me.” This is the boy becoming a man, and the man who formed him still needing him.

The marlin. Not a villain, not a prize. A brother. A being larger than Santiago, more beautiful than Santiago, and as trapped in the contest as Santiago is. Hemingway spends many of the novel’s best pages inside Santiago’s imagining of what the fish is feeling. Their joining at noon — “Now we are joined together and have been since noon” — has the register of a marriage. The fish’s death is the novel’s central grief.

The sharks. Not metaphors for critics, not metaphors for bad luck, not metaphors for anything. They are sharks. They come because of the blood. They do what sharks do. The book is very clear about this: the sharks are not evil; they are the second half of the fishing. If you catch a fish bigger than your boat, eighty miles out, at dusk, you will lose it to the sharks. That is the arithmetic.

Symbols

Symbol	What it signals	Where it lives
The lions on the beach	Youth, peace, the uncorrupted part of Santiago still alive in his dreams	The dreams that open and close the novel
The mast across the shoulders	The crucifixion figure; the old man carrying his own cross up the hill	The return from the harbor to the shack
The sharks	Impersonal nature stripping what the man has won back to bone	The return journey, dusk to midnight
The skeleton of the marlin	Proof; the visible trace of what happened out there, no matter that the meat is gone	Lashed to the boat in the dawn harbor
The baseball references (DiMaggio)	The code by which Santiago measures himself: the professional who plays hurt, the bone spur	Santiago’s internal monologue during the fight

Key Debate

Man against nature — who wins? Hemingway insists on keeping the answer ambivalent. On the physical register, nature wins: the sharks strip the fish, the old man is ruined, he confesses he went too far. On the spiritual register, the man wins: Santiago returns with his dignity intact, the boy returns to him, the skeleton in the harbor is proof of a legend. The book refuses to collapse either side. Santiago says both “I ruined us both” and “a man can be destroyed but not defeated,” and both are true. The important thing is not who wins. The important thing is that he went out.

How It’s Written

The prose is the late Hemingway at his most stripped: sentences that could almost be a fishing manual, loaded with physical information, allergic to ornament. What Hemingway called the iceberg theory is fully operative here — one-eighth on the page, seven-eighths below. When Santiago is exhausted you get a sentence about the weight of the line. When he is frightened you get a sentence about the movement of the water. Emotion is communicated through objects and actions.

The narrator is third-person but glued to Santiago’s consciousness. He speaks aloud because he is alone. Hemingway uses this almost like a soliloquy device — we get Santiago’s internal life through the things he says to his own hands. The prose is also, unusually for Hemingway, openly religious in register: biblical cadences, crucifixion imagery, sacramental language about the fish.

The opening and closing mirror each other precisely. The book begins with the old man dreaming of the lions; it ends with the old man dreaming of the lions. What has changed is everything between. The village thought he was salao; now the skeleton is on the boat and the boy will not leave him. Outwardly he has lost everything. Inwardly he has held his position. That is the book’s arc.

Connections

• Ernest Hemingway — his late masterpiece; the Pulitzer book, the book that was cited when they gave him the Nobel, the book that answered the critics who had written him off.
• The Sun Also Rises — the grace-under-pressure code in its young form, lived by Jake Barnes and Pedro Romero; Santiago is the old age of that code.
• A Farewell to Arms — Frederic Henry’s separate peace becomes Santiago’s solitary work; both books about endurance after loss.
• Leo Tolstoy — Hemingway measured himself against War and Peace his whole career; the close attention to a body under strain is Tolstoyan, brought down to one man in a boat.
• Homer — Santiago is an Odyssean old man at sea, naming his enemies and his brothers, talking his solitude into a story.
• The Iliad — the warrior code of the man who knows he will lose and does it beautifully anyway.
• The Odyssey — the old sailor dragged home, the house waiting, the single loyal companion (the boy, standing in for Telemachus).
• Nausea — the anti-Hemingway answer to the same silent universe: Roquentin gives up, Santiago does not. Two 20th-century responses to contingency.
• The Myth of Sisyphus — Santiago is Sisyphus happy. The rock is the marlin. The boy is the recognition that made the labor worth it.
• Man’s Search for Meaning — Frankl’s will-to-meaning is Santiago’s code in psychological form: a man can endure almost any how if he has a why.
• The Absurd — Hemingway’s answer to it: code, brotherhood, endurance, the work done well even when the reward is stripped away.
• Alienation — the book’s quiet rebuttal; Santiago is solitary but not alienated, because he is inside a world that includes the fish, the sea, the boy, the lions.

Lineage

Predecessors

• The Sun Also Rises (1926) — the code invented, lived by expats around a bull ring
• A Farewell to Arms (1929) — the code tested against the war and the death of the beloved
• Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) — the American obsession-with-a-great-fish tradition, pulled toward a different ending
• Homer — the origin of the old-man-at-sea
• The Iliad — the fallen-but-not-defeated warrior

Successors

• The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) — the philosophical frame that caught up with what the novel already lives
• Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) — the psychological form of the same argument
• Cormac McCarthy — the lineage of stripped American prose about men in landscapes that do not care about them
• Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004) — the old man telling his life with grace under pressure, inherited