The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

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Santiago, of course, was once a young man himself. The idea of contesting that the ‘younger fisherman’ feel is deeply ingrained in the old man, who ‘goes out too far’ with the hamartia of one of the great heroes of mythology and legend. His other great contest is described in some detail in the book, and is with a man not a fish. The parallels are clear, however. The struggle with the negro takes the same length of time; their elbows are connected by a ‘chalk line’ just as Santiago and the fish are joined by the fishing line. But the parallels simply make the differences clearer. The arm-wrestling match is black and white , not through any racist overtones, but simply because the struggle is a simple battle of strength and wits between two men. The struggle with the fish is quite different – much less black and white – indeed it is, in many ways, a mental struggle within Santiago himself.

His feminisation of the sea is just one of many similar characteristics of this ‘old man.’ His loving care for the creatures he encounters is constantly emphasised by Hemingway. He even sees beauty in the man o’ war (‘The iridescent bubbles were beautiful’) as well as the Mako shark that first attacks the dead marlin. As a result he comes to share the fish’s pain – both before and after its death – and this is a major and obvious theme of much of the novel. It is still a contest of males, but it is also a bond of love, which must imply on some level the meeting of male with female. Santiago, indeed, often expresses these two feelings simultaneously as he becomes more and more aware of the paradox: ‘Fish…I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.’

In this, the reader can sense the female sea seeping into the heart of this most male of fishermen – or better to say the eyes, since it is how he sees things which changes as he grows older. His eyes, therefore, are immune to the age which gradually eats away at his masculinity: they are still ‘cheerful and undefeated,’ whereas ‘Everything’ else ‘about him was old.’ In this new balance of the female and male – ‘I love you…But I will kill you’ – Santiago finds a new heroism that is not a matter of contesting to win, but of endurance and perseverance in defeat. This becomes, in itself, a significant theme of the novel, and it is present from the very outset in the description, on the first page, of Santiago’s sail as a flag of ‘permanent defeat.’ A flag is a very male, military symbol of victory and pride. But the phrase ‘permanent defeat,’ as Hemingway uses it, is close to being an oxymoron. What does it mean to be permanently defeated?

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Ernest Hemingway
the Unkindness of Ravens If you have found our critical notes helpful, why not try the first Tower Notes novel, a historical fantasy set in the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions.

Available HERE where you can read the opening chapters.

The Unkindness of Ravens by Anthony Paul