The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.
I read all of Hemingway – including biographies, his collected letters, etc. – back in my early twenties, and I went through his work more or less chronologically. Because of this, I marvelled at how his great fictional characters were obviously idealised versions of himself – the adolescent outdoorsmen of his early short stories, the wounded WWI ambulance driver in A Farewell to Arms, members of the Spanish Civil War resistance in For Whom the Bell Tolls – and as young as I was at the time, I recognised the aging Hemingway in the Santiago character from The Old Man and the Sea; an old but powerful man whom others have written off; a man of skill and wisdom, strength and scars, desiring to prove himself through private struggle. Rereading this recently on a Cuban beach, that same Gulf Stream, trade winds, flight of ducks that Hemingway wrote about at my back, I appreciate this story even more at my advancing age: Hemingway set out to prove something with this effort, and he left blood on the page. Spoilers ahead.
Only I have no luck any more. But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.Santiago has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish, and he is now considered so unlucky by his village that Manolin, the boy he had taught to fish, has been forced by his family to go out with more successful fishermen. Even so, the boy helps the old man with his nets, brings him food and coffee, and talks baseball into the night. The tension between luck and experience seems to me to be the main thrust of this book (and was probably the foremost concern of Hemingway at the time as he had been cast aside as a has-been writer by then; he must have been preoccupied with the luck involved in using his carefully honed skills to pen another bestseller): as for Santiago, he dismisses the role of luck in his work, but suggests the boy buy a lotto ticket for the number 85; what he feels will be his lucky day. The old man also calls himself a man of little faith, but more than once finds himself saying prayers and promising pilgrimages if some listening deity were to intervene in the arduous ordeal he endures over the ensuing days. For on the eighty-fifth day, Santiago hooks a massive marlin – the biggest he had ever seen, valuable enough to sustain a man throughout the entire winter – and it will take him three days and nights to tire out the great fish and finally land a killing blow. Throughout, there is a mix of luck and skill involved in this epic struggle, and for every time Santiago notes what hard-learned tricks he is employing against the marlin, he also bemoans his foolishness in being underprepared – what he needed most of all was the boy in the skiff with him. As soon as the old man has the marlin tied alongside his boat, blood in the water attracts a string of sharks; and after not being able to fend off them all, Santiago eventually returns to his village with nothing more than a skeleton affixed to his skiff. Unskilled or unlucky? To those who measure the marlin's massive length, Santiago is revered as the luckiest and the most skilled of them all – and when the boy sees his mentor's wracked body and ruined hands, he weeps and vows to fish with him again; knowing he has much still to learn from the old man. As for Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea was a massive bestseller, restored his reputation, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to Hemingway receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year. Not bad for an old man's fish story.
“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed, but not defeated.”I enjoyed reading some expert analysis of this novella (much of it compiled in this article), and I was especially intrigued by Joseph Waldmeir's “Confiteor Hominem: Ernest Hemingway’s Religion of Man”, which details the Christian symbolism to be found in this book and explains how this serves as a capstone to the unique philosophy to be found in all of Hemingway's work. On the other hand, I love that the author himself had this to say:
There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.I'll take him at his word, I guess, and I also love that Hemingway had this to say to his editor went he sent in the manuscript for this book:
I know that it is the best I can write ever for all of my life, I think, and that it destroys good and able work by being placed alongside of it.And I love that famously rival author, William Faulkner, had this to say in his review of the book for the literary magazine Shenandoah:
His best. Time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us, I mean his and my contemporaries. This time, he discovered God, a Creator. Until now, his men and women had made themselves, shaped themselves out of their own clay; their victories and defeats were at the hands of each other, just to prove to themselves or one another how tough they could be. But this time, he wrote about pity: about something somewhere that made them all: the old man who had to catch the fish and then lose it, the fish that had to be caught and then lost, the sharks which had to rob the old man of his fish; made them all and loved them all and pitied them all. It’s all right. Praise God that whatever made and loves and pities Hemingway and me kept him from touching it any further.Naturally, I'm happy to allow Faulkner to analyse the craft involved here, but I will finish by saying that everything about this story worked for me: the plot, the characters, the tempo, the words. As Hemingway's last major piece to be published in his lifetime, The Old Man and the Sea is an incredible finale to a remarkable career.
He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on.
