Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea"

Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” is an extraordinarily well-written text on several levels. The first is aesthetic: the prose has a beauty that simultaneously pleases the eye and that provides a sense of satisfaction. The second is philosophical: beneath the simple and concise sentences and paragraphs one finds very stimulating insights and reflections on the meaning and nature of life. The last is the way it captures the intricacies of some forms of inter-generational and male to male bonding.

The book tells the story of an poor old fisherman in pre-revolutionary Cuba whose meagre, barely subsistence level livelihood depends on whether he catches enough fish to bring to Havana’s market. He lives in a one room shack by the sea, sleeps on crumpled newspapers rather than a mattress, wears the same clothes sewn with patches because he cannot afford to replace them, and eats sparingly whatever he is lucky enough to get his hands on—either while at sea or from the charitable donations of his neighbours. And yet despite his poverty the old man has a very meaningful and even elevated existence. For one, he does not complain about his lot. He is rather grateful for what he has and for the simple pleasures of life, like following American baseball and, most importantly, his fatherly friendship with the boy, the other main character of the text. The boy’s love for the old man, in turn, derives from the latter’s teaching him how to fish, which would be familiar to anyone who has developed a deep friendship with a former teacher, in part, because of the immense impact of the teacher on one’s mental formation. They also share a love of baseball, and conversations about the sport and its heroes, like Joe DiMaggio, take up a significant part of the book. This bond persists even though the boy has been instructed by his parents to not fish with the old man, who, unlike other fisherman, has not been treated kindly by the sea, going months without any significant catches. The boy must obey his parents and not fish with the old man, but this does not deter their deep affection for one another.

The text displays a form of realism that gives a sense of being present with the characters. This is especially the case with the protagonist, that is, the old man, whose features are described in minute and vivid detail:

“The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert” [emphasis mine]

The last line is an example of Hemingway’s masterful use of metaphor in a way that gives added substance and meaning to the characters and scenes he describes. It adds a vividness and vitality to the preceding observations that make the old man feel like a real, living breathing human being and not some literary construct. The metaphor evokes sympathy for a life of struggle and hardship that the scars, blotches, and wrinkles represent, while the image of the “fishless desert” encapsulates the man’s materially barren existence.

The old man is not at fault for his condition. Rather, it is the sea, characterized as it is by capricious and mysterious forces that arbitrarily determine a man’s fate and mock his finitude, evanescence, fragility, and fallibility. The old man, as well as other fisherman, are acutely aware of their inability to unlock the secrets of the sea, and recognize the limits of their language to capture its deep and powerful currents. It is for this reason that they use certain metaphors when talking about the sea. In this regard, gendered metaphors are salient, which is not surprising since Spanish, like other Romance languages, generally divides words into “male” and “female”, which are signified by the use of different definite articles: “la” for female, and “il” for male. While other fisherman call the sea “il mare”, the old man calls it the feminine “la mare”, because, according to him, of its power to give and withhold the things that man desires, to do good through acts of will and evil only when forced, and to display an unpredictability rooted in being closer to nature’s capriciousness. When the old man is angry at the sea, he call it “whore”, although the use of this foul language perhaps represents fleeting moments of intemperance at his sad condition rather than any deep seated misogyny. Overall, the old man has a great and abiding love and respect for the sea and the life forms that inhabit it.

This comes out clearly in the part of the story that consumes a large portion of the book, that is, the old man’s catching of a fish that seems to represent a turnaround from his bad luck. The fish is huge and weighs almost a ton; if the old man could successfully take it to shore, he could score enough revenue to get him through the winter. This part of the story has an epic quality to it: the old man, alone at sea for days, must struggle with this powerful creature through forays of stratagem, skill, ambition rooted in long and bitter experience and intuition. One of the notable features of this struggle is the juxtaposition between love and violence; the old man loves the fish, and silently communicates with it, envies its life below the water, is almost spiritually enmeshed with it, and yet he has to kill the fish, and oddly, for the old man this act of killing is somehow an extension of their love. This pairing of love and violence captures the intensity of the scenes and, as a literary device, is not unique to Hemingway. Homer used it extensively, as has Seamus Heaney, although they both used it to refer to human to human bonds. Hemingway applies it to the relationship between man and fish, although the old man continuously personalizes the creature, even calling it his “brother”. This anthropomorphizing of the fish gives the impression of some form of equality between them, which almost makes one forget that it is fundamentally a creature beneath man in terms of strength: man is the predator, the fish is the prey, and the latter must submit to the former. This basic fact remains regardless of the poetic license used to suggest the existence of some form of love between them.

 The struggle is characterized by long periods of calm, when the fish is below the sea and gently tugging the boat, punctuated with sporadic moments of drama, when it rises to the surface and reveals itself to the old man. The latter eventually triumphantly harpoons the fish and ties it to the boat, giving the impression that the unlucky old man might actually score a victory, but, like so many good stories, this one ends in defeat. As the old man sails back to shore, his catch is devoured by sharks, and although he attempts to prevent this calamity by killing the predators with whatever sharp object he can find on the boat, he is unable to kill enough of them, and by the time he arrives home his catch has been reduced to worthless skeleton. What promised to be a significant catch that would have fed and clothed him for all of the winter becomes another bitter example of his wretched condition. And yet despite this poverty, he has a lot to be grateful for, especially the boy who is waiting for his return at the shore, signaling that he loves him like a father and will probably ensure that he has enough to eat.