The Old Man and the Sea
The
Old Man and the Sea is a
short novel written by the American author Ernest
Hemingway in 1951 in Cuba, and published in 1952.[1] It was the last major work of fiction by Hemingway that was
published during his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it tells the story
of Santiago, an aging Cuban
fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf
Stream off the coast of Cuba.[2]
In
1953, The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was cited by the Nobel
Committee as contributing to their awarding
of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in 1954.[2]
Plot summary
The
Old Man and the Sea tells the story of a battle between
an aging, experienced fisherman, Santiago, and a large marlin. The story opens with Santiago having gone 84 days without
catching a fish, and now being seen as "salao", the worst form
of unluckiness. He is so unlucky that his young apprentice, Manolin, has been
forbidden by his parents to sail with him and has been told instead to fish
with successful fishermen. The boy visits Santiago's shack each night, hauling
his fishing gear, preparing food, talking about American baseball and his
favorite player, Joe DiMaggio.
Santiago tells Manolin that on the next day, he will venture far out into the
Gulf Stream, north of Cuba
in the Straits of Florida
to fish, confident that his unlucky streak is near its end.
On
the eighty-fifth day of his unlucky streak, Santiago takes his skiff into the Gulf Stream, sets his lines and by noon, has his
bait taken by a big fish that he is sure is a marlin. Unable to haul in the great marlin, Santiago is instead
pulled by the marlin, and two days and nights pass with Santiago holding onto
the line. Though wounded by the struggle and in pain, Santiago expresses a
compassionate appreciation for his adversary, often referring to him as a brother.
He also determines that, because of the fish's great dignity, no one shall
deserve to eat the marlin.
On
the third day, the fish begins to circle the skiff. Santiago, worn out and
almost delirious, uses all his remaining strength to pull the fish onto its
side and stab the marlin with a harpoon. Santiago straps the marlin to the side of his skiff and
heads home, thinking about the high price the fish will bring him at the market
and how many people he will feed.
On
his way in to shore, sharks
are attracted to the marlin's blood. Santiago kills a great mako
shark with his harpoon, but he loses the
weapon. He makes a new harpoon by strapping his knife to the end of an oar to help ward off the next line of sharks; five sharks are
slain and many others are driven away. But the sharks keep coming, and by
nightfall the sharks
have almost devoured the marlin's entire carcass, leaving a skeleton consisting
mostly of its backbone, its tail, and its head. Santiago knows that he is
defeated and tells the sharks of how they have killed his dreams. Upon reaching
the shore before dawn on the next day, Santiago struggles to his shack,
carrying the heavy mast on his shoulder, leaving the fish head and the bones on
the shore. Once home, he slumps onto his bed and falls into a deep sleep.
A
group of fishermen gather the next day around the boat where the fish's
skeleton is still attached. One of the fishermen measures it to be 18 feet
(5.5 m) from nose to tail. Pedrico is given the head of the fish, and the
other fishermen tell Manolin to tell the old man how sorry they are. Tourists
at the nearby café mistakenly take it for a shark. The boy, worried about the
old man, cries upon finding him safe asleep and at his injured hands. Manolin
brings him newspapers and coffee. When the old man wakes, they promise to fish
together once again. Upon his return to sleep, Santiago dreams of his youth—of
lions on an African beach.
Background and publication
No good book has ever been written
that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in .... I tried to
make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks.
But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things.
Written
in 1951, and published in 1952, The Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway's
final full-length work published during his lifetime. The book, dedicated to
"Charlie Scribner"
and to Hemingway's literary editor "Max
Perkins",[4][5] was featured in Life magazine on September 1, 1952, and five million copies of
the magazine were sold in two days.[6]
The
Old Man and the Sea became a Book of the Month Club selection, and made Hemingway a celebrity.[7] Published in book form on September 1, 1952, the first
edition print run was 50,000 copies.[8] The illustrated edition featured black and white pictures
by Charles Tunnicliffe
and Raymond Sheppard.[9]
In
May 1953, the novel received the Pulitzer
Prize[9] and was specifically cited when in 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature which he dedicated to the Cuban people.[10][11] The success of The Old Man and the Sea made
Hemingway an international celebrity.[7] The Old Man and the Sea is taught at schools around
the world and continues to earn foreign royalties.[12]
Literary significance and criticism
The
Old Man and the Sea served to reinvigorate Hemingway's
literary reputation and prompted a reexamination of his entire body of work.
The novel was initially received with much popularity; it restored many
readers' confidence in Hemingway's capability as an author. Its publisher, Scribner's,
on an early dust jacket, called the novel a "new classic", and many
critics favorably compared it with such works as William
Faulkner's short story The Bear and Herman
Melville's novel Moby-Dick.
Several
critics note that Santiago hails from the Canary Islands, and that his Spanish
origins have an influence in the novella.[13][14][15] After immigrating to Cuba in his 20s, later in life
Santiago dreams about the Canary Islands and mixes Cuban and Peninsular Spanish
vocabulary. His biography has many similarities to that of Gregorio Fuentes,
Hemingway’s first mate.[13]
Gregorio
Fuentes, who many critics believe was an
inspiration for Santiago, was a blue-eyed man born on Lanzarote in the Canary
Islands. After going to sea at age ten on
ships that called in African ports, he migrated permanently to Cuba when he was
22. After 82 years in Cuba, Fuentes attempted to reclaim his Spanish
citizenship in 2001.[16] Critics have noted that Santiago was also at least 22 when
he immigrated from Spain to Cuba, and thus old enough to be considered an
immigrant—and a foreigner—in Cuba.[13][17]
Hemingway
at first planned to use Santiago's story, which became The Old Man and the
Sea, as part of an intimacy between mother and son. Relationships in the
book relate to the Bible,
which he referred to as "The Sea Book". Some aspects of it did appear
in the posthumously published Islands in the
Stream. Hemingway mentions the real life
experience of an old fisherman almost identical to that of Santiago and his
marlin in On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter (Esquire,
April 1936).[18][19]
Joseph
Waldmeir's essay "Confiteor Hominem: Ernest Hemingway's Religion of
Man" is a favorable critical reading of the novel—and one which has
defined analytical considerations since. Perhaps the most memorable claim is
Waldmeir's answer to the question—What is the book's message?
The
answer assumes a third level on which The Old Man and the Sea must be
read—as a sort of allegorical commentary on all his previous work, by means of
which it may be established that the religious overtones of The Old Man and
the Sea are not peculiar to that book among Hemingway's works, and that
Hemingway has finally taken the decisive step in elevating what might be called
his philosophy of Manhood to the level of a religion.[20]
Waldmeir
considered the function of the novel's Christian imagery,[original research?]
most notably through Hemingway's reference to the crucifixion of Christ
following Santiago's sighting of the sharks that reads:
"Ay,"
he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a
noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his
hands and into the wood.[21]
One
of the most outspoken critics of The Old Man and the Sea is Robert P.
Weeks. His 1962 piece "Fakery in The Old Man and the Sea"
presents his argument that the novel is a weak and unexpected divergence from
the typical, realistic Hemingway (referring to the rest of Hemingway's body of
work as "earlier glories").[22] In juxtaposing this novel against Hemingway's previous
works, Weeks contends:
The
difference, however, in the effectiveness with which Hemingway employs this
characteristic device in his best work and in The Old Man and the Sea is
illuminating. The work of fiction in which Hemingway devoted the most attention
to natural objects, The Old Man and the Sea, is pieced out with an
extraordinary quantity of fakery, extraordinary because one would expect to
find no inexactness, no romanticizing of natural objects in a writer who
loathed W. H. Hudson,
could not read Thoreau,
deplored Melville's rhetoric in Moby Dick, and who was himself
criticized by other writers, notably Faulkner, for his devotion to the facts
and his unwillingness to 'invent.'[22]
Legacy
In
1954, Hemingway donated his Nobel Prize gold medal in Literature to the
venerated Marian image of Our Lady of Charity.
The Swedish medal was stolen in 1986, but was returned later upon the threat of
Raúl Castro,
brother of Fidel Castro.[23]
The
Old Man and the Sea has been adapted for the screen
three times: a 1958 film starring Spencer
Tracy, a 1990 miniseries starring Anthony
Quinn, and a 1999 animated short
film. It is often taught in high schools
as a part of the American literature curriculum.
In
2003, the book was listed at number 173 on the BBC's The
Big Read poll of the UK's 200
"best-loved novels".[24]
References
· The Editors (August 25, 1952). "From
Ernest Hemingway to the Editors of Life". Life. Time Inc. 33 (8): 124. ISSN 0024-3019. Hemingway's work is a 27,000-word novel called The Old Man
and the Sea.
· · Hemingway. The
Old Man and the Sea. p. 5
· · Perkins,
Maxwell (2004). Bruccoli, Matthew J.; Baughman, Judith (eds.). The
sons of Maxwell Perkins: letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway,
Thomas Wolfe, and their editor.
University of South Carolina Press. p. xxvii. ISBN 1-57003-548-2.
· · "A
Hemingway timeline Any man's life, told truly, is a novel". The Kansas City Star. KansasCity.com. June 27, 1999. Archived from the
original on October 12, 2008. Retrieved
August 29, 2009.
·
Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey (2017). "Cuba in Hemingway". The
Hemingway Review. 36: 8-41 https://www.academia.edu/33255402/Cuba_in_Hemingway.
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