“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” What a start. Anyone could take that opening line and dream up a tale, but nobody could do what Hemingway did.
You have to have lived a bit to understand Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea. It’s hard to grasp the magnitude of the story until you’ve matriculated past youth. Moreover, wrestling with Hemingway’s final act, and his decline thereafter, is profound for those with enough years to recognize the relationship between the book and Hemingway’s life.
The book is full of purpose, powerful prose, wisdom, courage, the natural world and human nature. It’s even theological if you allow. Hemingway’s words are simple but nimble and mighty like the jab of a highly trained boxer. But what is the purpose behind the language?
Like all great literature, the story and characters are driven by a purpose. Santiago is a tough old man who dreams of his youth, not the future. Like Santiago, we all reach a point where our best is behind us – we will never again be as strong or good looking or smart as we were in the past. The old man is juxtaposed by “the boy” who is his fishing partner, as least until the boy’s parents prevent him from fishing with the unlucky old man. For Santiago he finds joy in dreaming about the lions on the beach in Africa – a revisited moment from his youth. What do those lions represent? Many things, perhaps, but at the least the lions represent a happy part of his youth. Santiago is not just a man, he’s an “old man” trained on a moment in time.
“He was asleep in a short time and he dreamed of Africa when he was a boy and the long golden beaches and the white beaches, so white they hurt your eyes, and the high capes and the great brown mountains. He lived along the coast now every night and in his dreams he heard the surf roar and saw the native boats come riding through it. He smelled the tar and oakum of the deck as he slept and he smelled the smell of Africa that the land breeze brought at morning…He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, not contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and of the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy.”
In those words, Hemingway reveals his character – and perhaps himself. The longing for youth is nothing new, but the delivery is fresh. Hemingway’s short, athletic prose make the scenes as palpable as the smells and shivers and pain we feel along with Santiago. In the pre-dawn glow, the old man rows us out to sea. Santiago, as we learn, is tough and courageous, a fishing tactician, confident, patient, wise, compassionate, and willing to die just to experience the fight. We get all that, a story full of vitality, with just an old man and his skiff. His courage becomes a main thread – would we all like to be like Santiago? Can anyone ask for a better final round of life than having the willingness to fight and die for the thrill of it?
The boy is a terrific character as well because he’s like a son to Santiago and the one person the old man longs for as he’s battling the great marlin. The confluence of Santiago, the boy, the side stories we learn as Santiago fishes, the sharks, the deep admiration for the great fish, and the religious symbolism create a simple but true tale. It might be a work of fiction, but the feelings and emotions are more scientific than any peer reviewed journal. It’s the fight, however, that brings Hemingway’s high-powered analysis to life.
Once the marlin takes the bait, the story propels forcefully to the end. In those pages, Hemingway shows Santiago’s admiration for the fish and it’s that relationship with the marlin that shows Santiago’s heart and draws us near reality. The old man calls the great fish a friend and a brother. In the midst of battle, Santiago feels for his advisory: “Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. How many people will he feed, he thought. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity.”
Santiago’s fight with the fish is the kind of battle we all wish we could fight. It’s noble, brave, respectful. They play a zero-sum game; the winner lives and the loser will not. But it’s not the winning, it’s the adventure. What we see is Santiago executing a lifetime of technical skill, patients, faith in himself, and hard work as he battles the great fish. Undergirding the battle is Hemingway defining a noble fight. He describes Santiago like a prize fighter – bloody hands, cramping, his body giving out because he’s tired, he falls and cuts his face, and he digs deeper. In it, Hemingway shows us the value in the journey, it’s about more than harvesting meat. By the end of the fight, Santiago feels like he has disrespected the fish – a part of the noble scheme Hemingway values.
Throughout the book Hemingway trickles in pieces of wisdom. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated,” for instance, might be Hemingway’s definition of manliness. Many have asked, as Hemingway does, if the most meaningful battles have to be fought alone? “We are now joined together and have been since noon. And no one to help either one of us” – sometimes they do. There are as well obvious Christian undertones – sacrifice and struggle, the old man talking to himself about sin, the three-day fishing excursion, and reverence for the excruciating sacrifice made by the fish.
In one of the final scenes, tourist mistaken Santiago’s great fish for a shark – “stupid tourist” is the natural response, but perhaps it’s more. The tourist are ignorant of Santiago’s great catch, his struggle, his life, his purpose. Is this Hemingway showing readers that people outside our story don’t know anything about us? Conversely, there is no way for us to understand other people or for us to know the things they have done and left undone? We, along with everyone else, see through faulty eyes.
The boy and Santiago promise to fish again together – because it reminds Santiago of the past. Will the boy one day grow into the character of Santiago? Is this the tale the boy will be dreaming about when he’s the old man, just as Santiago recalls the lions? If it is, then perhaps Hemingway is instructing us to pass along dreams for those who follow.
Is Santiago the epitaph Hemingway elected to leave for himself? A tough old man willing to fight to the death who had nobody to help him as he battled a magnificent fish. It’s hard not to wonder if Hemingway was dreaming of days past and wishing the boy was there as he wrote this masterful novella. Who were Hemingway’s sharks? The writer, like the old man, must have felt alone battling the sharks. Did Hemingway want to go out like Santiago, confident enough not to care what the other fisherman thought and courageous enough to stoically face death.
And finally, what is a takeaway worth holding? Maybe it’s, don’t waste your youth. Santiago’s dreams about a wonderful moment from his younger days, but what if he never saw the lions? What would have driven him? If he did not live as a young man, maybe he could not have lived as an old one.
