Материал: The Old Man and the Sea ( PDFDrive )

wanted it. Manolin wants it, and swears that from that day forth they will only fish together. The old man asks about his family, and Manolin replies that he will bring his luck to Santiago's boat so that they can fish successfully together.

Manolin goes away, promising to return with food and the newspapers of the past few days. As he leaves, he begins to cry again.

That day some tourists happen upon the massive fish skeleton in the harbor. They ask one of the locals what it was, and are told "Tiburon," or shark, by way of explanation. They think that the local means that it is the skeleton of a shark, not understanding the 5 days of needless pain and suffering to which the one-word answer referred. On the other side of the town, Manolin is sitting by the bed of the old man, weeping as he watches him sleep. The old man sleeps peacefully, dreaming of lions.

Analysis

The unique relationship between the old man and the boy is one of the highlights of this novella. It seems as though the boy has more loyalty and love for the old man than even his own parents, who he refers to slightly disdainfully. They are not fishermen--it seems-- and the old man and the boy are joined by the bonds of the countless hours they have spent alone together at sea. When the boy offers the old man a beer, the old man replies, "why not? Between fishermen." It also seems that the boy is somewhat alone in his love for the old man, as the other fisherman and townspeople laugh at his misfortunes, thinking him unlucky and past the age of a successful fisherman. This creates a solitary figure in the old man, more so since the boy's parents forced him to stop fishing with the old man, and this solitary hero is a familiar figure in many of Hemingway's works.

The old man is described as "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…his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. However, none of these scars was fresh. They

were as old as erosions in a fishless desert. Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated." This description sets up the theme of a multitude of battles that the old man faces. Old age is certainly one of these battles, along with sharks, sleep deprivation, hunger and thirst, and of course the fish itself. As with his cheerful eyes, shining hopefully in an old and decrepit body, the old man remains undefeated, until the very end of his battle with the sea.

The boy asks the old man if he feels up to catching another really big fish. The old man answers that what he lacks in strength he will make up for in his many years worth of tricks he has learned at sea. This question foreshadows what the bulk of the novella will be, an old man pitted against an enormous fish.

One of the main themes of this book is hope. After 84 days of unlucky fishing, Hemingway writes "his hope and confidence had never gone. But now they were freshening as when the breeze rises."

It is immediately evident that whereas once the old man had taken care of the young boy, the boy, now grown into a young man, is taking care of his old friend. As they are eating dinner together the boy thinks to himself, "I must have water here for him, and soap and a good towel. Why am I so thoughtless? I must get him another shirt and a jacket for the winter and some sort of shoes and another blanket."

After dinner, the great fish that may get the better of the old man is foreshadowed once again. The boy compliments the old man, saying that he is the greatest fisherman. The old man thanks him for the compliment, and says "You make me happy. I hope no fish will come along so great that he will prove us wrong." "There is no such fish if you are still strong as you say," the boy responds. This dialog, along with the various mentions of 85 being a lucky day, foreshadows that the following day something important will happen in the lives of the old man and the boy. Hemingway's taut journalistic style and staccato dialog makes us excited and ready for the events to come.

In the morning as they are drinking coffee the boy asks the old man how he slept, and he replies, "Very well, Manolin. I feel confident today." We have just now learned the boy's name, which is also indicative of Hemingway's sparse narrative style.

Hemingway, in his own unique style, does away with all superfluous details, paring away names, emotions, and reactions to present the reader with a story that forces us to draw our own conclusions with regards to emotions and reactions, and rely on the hard-hitting, profound dialog that is Hemingway's trademark for his richly developed characters' thoughts and ideas.

The old man had always thought of the sea in the feminine, and calls her la mar, "which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her." Some of the younger fishermen refer to her as el mar, and thought of the sea "as a contestant or a place or even an enemy." The old man thought of her always as a woman, and "as something that gave or withheld great favors, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman." One aspect of Hemingway's writing that makes it distinctive is his evident love of and familiarity with the Spanish language. Hemingway spent a great deal of time in Spain and Cuba, and brings phrases and peculiarities of the Spanish language into his literature, although it is written in English.

Once he drops his lines into the deep waters, we find that the old man's sense of hope is more than simply blind hope, but is a mixture of skill as well. He looks at his lines, and observes that he keeps them straighter than any other fisherman does, so that at each level, the bait is there waiting where he wants it to be for the right fish. Other fishermen let them drift with the current, and that sometimes the bait lingers at sixty fathoms when they think they are at one hundred. "I keep them with precision," he says. "Only I have no luck anymore. 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." This combination of precision and luck, along with an iron will, will assist him in his upcoming battle with the big fish.

During the night, the old man begins to think with sadness of the fish. He thinks, "he is wonderful and strange and who knows how old he is…Never have I had such a strong fish nor one who acted so strangely. Perhaps he is too wise to jump. He could ruin me by jumping or by a wild rush. But perhaps he has been hooked many times before and he knows that this is how he should make his fight. He cannot know that it is only one man against him, nor that it is an old man…But what a great fish he is…He took the bait like a male and he pulls like a male and his fight has no panic in it. I wonder if he has any plans or if he is just as desperate as I am?" The old man has begun to feel a kinship with the fish, and feels that they are equally pitted in battle.

It is important to note at this point that Hemingway is a big fan of bull fighting, a subject which appears frequently in other works of his. It's possible that the old man admires his opponent of being worthy of his years of fishing skills in the same way that a seasoned bullfighter admires the bull he is fighting and respects him if he is a worthy opponent, regardless of the outcome of the battle. It is not only bull fighting that captures Hemingway's imagination, but heroes of all kind, including soldiers, revolutionaries, and baseball players. Baseball is a recurring theme in the novella, and Hemingway points repeatedly to DiMaggio as the greatest baseball player of all time, a legend in his world as Santiago was once a legend in his.

The old man remembers, as he is pondering the male strength of his fish, a time when he caught a marlin. It was a female, caught first because the male marlin will always chivalrously allow the female to feed first. Once she was caught and brought on board, the male marlin stayed by the boat, and even once jumped high in the air to see what had happened to his companion. The loneliness of the male marlin brought back thoughts of the boy, and he contemplates his choice to allow himself to be dragged by his fish out into the depths of the sea, into the unknown. These melancholy thoughts of the old man make it clear to the reader that this journey out to sea, beyond the everyday loneliness of living without his wife, of fishing without the boy, clearly symbolize the old man's journey towards death.

However, this is not a religious experience for him, but a test of his will against that of another living creature. Nonetheless, once he has seen the size of his opponent, he decides that he will say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys, and promises aloud to make a pilgrimage to the Virgin of Cobre should he manage to catch the fish.

This quest is also about proving his worth to the boy and his parents, so that the boy may come back and fish with him again, or so that at least he would not die without the respect of the person who most mattered to him in the world. "The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it."

The old man thinks about sleeping, and about the lions that constantly haunt his dreams. The lions are a symbol of his youth, and of a time when he was easily strong enough to conquer the big fish, or at least had companions to help him. The fish is a symbol of himself in his old age. Perhaps the battle with the great fish is not so much a battle against a fish, but a battle against himself, and it is he himself that he must prove his own worth to.

When the fish has finally begun to circle, the old man is more tired than he has ever been. He thinks suddenly that the fish is so great an opponent that it does not matter if he kills or is killed by the fish. He says, "You are killing me, fish. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who." Although we do not yet know who will kill whom, we know that the man is old and frail, and is nearing his time to die. Perhaps Hemingway tells us that the fish, in his courage, calmness and nobility, is providing a role model for the old man to follow into death, even if he is not the cause of it.

Once again, after the fish has been caught and harpooned, when the old man is sailing south-westward towards the shore, when his thoughts have become unclear through exhaustion, the old man is unsure whether he is bringing in the fish, or if the fish is bringing him in. He points to the position of the fish as the source of his confusion. He