Analysis of ‘The Old Man and the Sea’

The Old Man and the Sea is a 1952 novella by Ernest Hemingway. He wrote it between December 1950 and February 1951, but published it in September 1952. It was the last major fictional work he published in his lifetime.

The novella was highly anticipated and released to record sales. Initial critical reception was highly positive, though its reputation has been more varied and somewhat less enthusiastic since, with a number of critics deeming it inferior to Hemingway’s earlier works.

Nonetheless, TOMATS has continued to be popular, as a book in English lessons around the world, according to Jeffrey Meyers‘s Hemingway: A Biography–1985). The Big Read, a 2003 BBC survey of the UK’s 200 “best-loved novels,” ranked TOMATS at #173.

Hemingway was directly involved in the 1958 film adaptation of the novella, with Spencer Tracy as Santiago, but Hemingway ended up disliking the film. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 for TOMATS, the first time he’d ever received the award. Even Fulgencio Batista, the new dictator of Cuba (the setting for the novella), gave Hemingway a Medal of Honor for the novella; though Hemingway disapproved of the new regime, he did accept the medal.

TOMATS got its highest recognition in 1954, when it won Hemingway the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy praised the novella for its “powerful, style-making mastery of the art of modern narration.”

Here are some quotes from the novella.

John Killinger in the 1960s connected TOMATS with Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Friedrich Nietzsche, that is, with philosophical existentialism and absurdism. I find such connections to be apt, given these philosophies’ focus on the meaninglessness of life in a world without God, and the absurdity of trying so hard to achieve something, only to fail, then to realize that one must nonetheless keep trying, in spite of one’s efforts’ futility.

We see this absurdism in Santiago’s painstaking efforts to catch the huge marlin, only to have it eaten down to the bone by sharks. Still, after this great disappointment, which in turn has come after an 84-day losing streak of never catching any fish, he as a fisherman must keep trying to catch fish in the future. Santiago thus is like Sisyphus, doomed to roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down and have to roll it up again, over and over, throughout eternity.

Another way to look at TOMATS is to do a comparison and contrast of the novella with such literary works as Moby-Dick and Life of Pi (which I will get into later on). Santiago thus corresponds with Captain Ahab, though their personalities are practically diametrical opposites: the former, a humble Cuban fisherman, is linked to St. James the Apostle, whose Spanish name is Santiago; mad, monomaniacal Ahab the whaler, on the other hand, is linked by name to the wicked King of Israel who introduced the worship of Baal to the ancient Hebrews and caused his kingdom to lapse into decadence.

In this analogy, the giant marlin corresponds, of course, to the white whale, though again the two are opposites in crucial ways. Santiago kills the marlin, as opposed to Captain Ahab being killed by Moby Dick. Santiago lashes the killed marlin to his skiff, whereas Captain Ahab is tangled in the line of the harpoon he’s thrown at the whale, tying him to the whale and being taken out to sea with it, dying as it swims away.

So in these ways, TOMATS is Moby-Dick in miniature and the anti-Moby-Dick, if you will, the two books being a kind of Hegelian dialectic of each other.

TOMATS is a miniature Moby-Dick not just in terms of literal size, that of the books and that of the marine animals…or of the boats and bodies of water in which the two stories are set, for that matter. Moby-Dick has a grand theme about seeking out the truth, symbolized by the white whale, while putting oneself in danger of self-destruction if one carries this quest too far, as Ahab does (see my blog post, link above, for details). TOMATS has a theme of searching for meaning and purpose, as symbolized by the marlin, yet failing to get that meaning (all Santiago has to show for his catch is the marlin’s skeleton, lashed to his skiff).

Santiago’s wounded pride is also a miniature of Ahab’s. The whale’s having bitten off Ahab’s leg, a symbolic castration, is a narcissistic injury infuriating the captain so much that he’s obsessed with finding the whale, sailing all over the world with his crew in the Pequod to find it and get his…revenge…on an animal?

Santiago, on the other hand, is merely saddened by his bad luck streak of eighty-four days of not catching any fish, gaining the bad reputation in his Cuban fisherman’s community as salao (very unlucky). He doesn’t sail out to the ends of the earth, as Ahab does, in the hopes of catching something to restore his sinking reputation. He merely sails further out into the Gulf Stream. In fact, after encountering the many difficulties he’s had in catching the marlin and having sharks bite off chunks of it, he regrets his having gone out so far; Ahab, even in dying, never regrets his lust for revenge.

As for the “anti-Moby-Dick” aspects of TOMATS, recall Ahab’s undying hate of the whale, as contrasted with Santiago’s love of the marlin, calling it his “brother” and feeling appreciation, respect, and compassion for it. Since Santiago (Spanish for St. James, recall, who was originally a fisherman himself, incidentally) can also be linked with Jesus, with the cuts and injuries Santiago gets in his struggles to reel in the marlin being compared by some critics to Christ’s wounds during His Passion and crucifixion, then his love of the marlin can also be linked with Christ’s words on the Cross about those who put Him up there: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34)

Another example of how TOMATS is Moby-Dick in miniature is in how the latter uses grandiose diction, whereas the former uses simple diction and shorter sentences. Instead of there being complex symbolism coupled with a deep analysis of that symbolism, as happens in Moby-Dick with its “Etymology,” “Cetology,” and “The Whiteness of the Whale,” in TOMATS we have a simpler symbolism with no breaks from the narrative that go off into tangents. Whereas Moby-Dick is a deluge of allusions and references to all kinds of literature, there’s very little of that in TOMATS.

Manolin, the boy who helps Santiago and would do anything for him, sympathizing with him to the point of weeping for him at the end when he sees the old man’s disappointment with the skeletal remains of the marlin lashed to the skiff, is again in stark contrast to Starbuck, who says all he can to discourage Ahab from going through with his self-destructive lust for…revenge?…against the white whale. In these characters’ opposing natures, we again can see how TOMATS is the anti-Moby-Dick, or rather that Moby-Dick could be renamed The Madman and the Sea.

To go into other aspects of TOMATS, Manolin and Santiago have a conversation, during which the old man says that eighty-five is a lucky number (superstitious nonsense, of course), and he fancies that he’ll bring in a fish “over a thousand pounds”, to which the boy, unlike Starbuck, gives no objections. Then they discuss what the newspaper will say about American baseball.

For a poor fishing community in Cuba, the only interesting baseball teams would be the American ones, like the Yankees, the Detroit Tigers, the Cincinnati Reds, the Chicago White Sox, or the Cleveland Indians. Santiago’s hero is Joe DiMaggio (whose father was a fisherman, as Santiago later notes–page 105). This looking to the US for role models instead of those inside one’s own country is symbolic and reflective of the influence of US imperialism, including its cultural forms.

Though Batista’s US-backed government wasn’t yet in power as of Hemingway’s writing of the novella, the resentment among many Cubans against US imperialism was already keenly felt, and it would have led to the nationalist and anti-imperialist Orthodox Party and Authentic Party leading in the polls in 1952, with Batista’s United Action coalition running a distant third. He had to take power in a coup that year in order to preserve an American political and economic hegemony that many Cubans had already been tiring of.

Hemingway, as a leftist who recognized the huge debt the world owed the Soviet Union for defeating the Nazis, would consciously or unconsciously have added this detail of Cubans worshipping American baseball players as an example of American cultural hegemony over Cuba, the cultural superstructure over the base of social relations that manifests internationally through imperialism. I’ve already mentioned Hemingway’s disapproval of Batista’s regime. Santiago’s painstaking efforts to catch the giant marlin, ultimately ending in failure, also reflects the reality of the doomed attempts of the poor to improve their lot in society, a reality underscored by how living in a Third World country under the boot of US imperialism will ensure that such attempts at improvement are, at best, no more than mere millimetres away from being absolutely impossible.

On pages 29-30, Santiago contemplates whether to think of the sea as feminine (la mar) or masculine (el mar). When the sea is understood to be feminine, she is loved by the fishermen, even when they are mad at her for withholding her bounty. If the sea is seen as masculine, though, then the fishermen regard him as a contestant or as an enemy. These fishermen tend to use buoys as floats for their lines, and they have motorboats–that is, they have the conveniences of modern technology that Santiago lacks. Still, in his humble simplicity and disadvantage, he still has more love for her than they have for him.

Just as I observed in my analysis of Moby-Dick (link above), the sea or ocean is symbolic of the unifying oneness of Brahman, a dialectical monism in which the water’s crests and troughs represent duality within the unity of the ocean as a totality. Sometimes the sea gives, and sometimes it takes away. Like Job, Santiago can accept this reality.

The marine life in TOMATS, like the white whale as I discussed it in that analysis, represent all of the things–as fixed entities that don’t seem to go through the endless flux and change of the sea–that are either desired, objects of attachment like the marlin, or are hated and dreaded, like the sharks that eat up the marlin.

As the Buddhists understand, these things have a way of tricking us into thinking that they have a permanence, when they are no more permanent than the constantly moving sea. The absurdism of Santiago’s trying to catch and keep the marlin is in his futile hope that it will be there with him, intact, all the way back on his trip to the shore.

Remember that while there are opposing tendencies between TOMATS and Moby-Dick, there are also parallels. One example is when Santiago, on having realized that the marlin has taken the bait, expresses his determination to keep struggling, even to the death, until he catches it. ‘”Fish,” he said softly, aloud, “I’ll stay with you until I am dead.”‘ (page 52) This is just like Ahab’s words on having harpooned the whale: “to the last I grapple with thee.” Santiago will harpoon the marlin, too.

Still, with this parallel, there is also the dialectical negation, as I mentioned above, of Santiago’s professed love of the marlin: ‘”Fish,” he said, “I love you and respect you very much.”‘ This is to be contrasted with Ahab’s words: “from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” But in the end there’s a sublation of both Santiago’s and Ahab’s attitude in these words of the former: “But I will kill you dead before this day ends.” (page 54) One harpooner loves his prey, the other hates his prey–both are determined to kill their prey.

The comparisons between the suffering of Santiago and that of Jesus are exemplified with the injuries to the hands of the former, a fisher of the marlin, and the hands of the latter, a fisher of men (Matthew 4:19). Santiago “felt the line carefully with his right hand and noticed his hand was bleeding.” (pages 55-56) The cut on his hand is like one of the stigmata. The absurdism of his suffering is that it’s all in vain, as if Christ hadn’t risen, making Church teaching and faith also in vain (1 Corinthians 15:14).

Moby-Dick isn’t the only book with a narrative of someone at sea and having deep religious, mystical, and philosophical themes that can be compared to those of TOMATS: another such novel is Life of Pi (The Young Man and the Sea, if you will), a book I plan to do an analysis of in about a month or so after this writing is published. One such a comparison is in how alone Santiago feels, so far away from the shore in his skiff (pages 60-61). The sight of ducks flying reminds him, however, that one is never alone at sea.

Pi is in a lifeboat with Richard Parker, a Bengal tiger, and though he insists that his tense relationship with the animal has saved his life by giving it purpose, he’s still starving for human company. Santiago may imagine that the flying ducks are giving him company, and that the marlin is his “brother,” but he’s still alone enough to wish he had Manolin with him. Ahab has a whole crew of harpooners to help him, but in his madness, he’s alienating all of his colleagues and thus making himself all alone at sea.

The point is that in all three stories’ cases, the ocean represents that formless void from which everything comes–Brahman, primordial Chaos, tohu-wa-bohu, Bion‘s O, Lacan‘s Real, or the Jungian collective unconscious and its Shadow, call it what you will. The marine animals swimming about in it–whales, marlins, flying fish, etc.–represent all those things we are attached to, and which cause us pain and suffering when we cannot get them. The quest for them must be undertaken alone, regardless of whether we choose to go on the quest, as Ahab and Santiago do, or if we’re thrown into the quest against our will, as happens to Pi.

The lone man’s confrontation with the briny Absolute is symbolic of Jung’s notion of Individuation. It’s a necessary spiritual quest fraught with danger, including the possibility of losing one’s mind, as almost happened to Jung himself. Santiago suffers terribly, with his stigmata-like cuts and overexertions, and ultimately in vain, like the absurdist Sisyphus rolling up the rock again and again; but he keeps his sanity, thanks to his abiding humility.

On the other hand, Ahab, in his narcissism and bloated self-concept, is doomed not only to death but also to an unquenchable madness in his attempt at this Individuation. Pi’s experience seems similar to Jung’s: he has a humility similar to Santiago’s, but the intense trauma that Pi goes through (the loss of his entire family, the ongoing fear of being killed and eaten by the tiger, no human contact or sight of land for what seems months, near starvation, etc.) brings him dangerously close to madness.

To take my point further, a confrontation with the Absolute, with Brahman, with ‘God’–whichever–is an attempt to reach heaven by unavoidably going through hell first, as I discussed in my analysis of Allen Ginsberg‘s “Howl,” and as Christ‘s Passion and harrowing of hell, properly interpreted, are an allegory of. Attaining divine blessedness isn’t a walk in the park; it shouldn’t and mustn’t be sentimentalized. To overcome suffering and enter nirvana, one must accept and embrace suffering.

Another point of comparison with all three books is how the animal objects of desire, hate, or dread are all male, at least symbolically so, as opposed to the essentially feminine sea–la mer est la mère, or la mar, as Santiago calls her. Moby Dick, a sperm whale, spouts masculinity like an ejaculation. Santiago’s marlin (a pun on man, with the added rli?) has a phallic “sword…as long as a baseball bat and tapered like a rapier” (page 62). Pi’s unlikely marine companion, Richard Parker, has a name to reinforce his masculinity in our minds. These animals, in their…phallic?…solidity, make for a decidedly male contrast to the feminine sea, whose waves flow like a dancing woman’s curves, and whose liquidity is like a mother’s milk, or like a pregnant woman’s amniotic fluid, released when her “water breaks.”

Parallel to this masculine/feminine opposition is that of the fire of desire, hate, or dread versus the calmly moving waves of nirvana’s water. The hard, unbending solidity of desire, hate, or dread is the samsara that the flowing ease of nirvana is antithetical to. There are things we desire, and want to keep; there are things we hate and dread, and thus wish to keep away. Neither the wanted nor the unwanted, however, can be kept or kept away; both must be allowed to flow in and flow out, as the oceanic waves of Brahman do. Still, there are storms at sea, which Santiago dreads in the hurricane months (page 61), the hell one must go through, as Pi does, before reaching heaven.

On page 63, Santiago has discovered that the marlin “is two feet longer than the skiff,” hence his need to lash the fish to the side of the boat after he’s reeled it in and killed it. This will be a tiring task.

When Santiago decides to pray “ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys” (pages 64-65), though he admits that he isn’t religious, we come to another point of comparison among TOMATS, Moby-Dick, and Life of Pi: to believe, or not to believe. Santiago is essentially the agnostic–he will “say his prayers mechanically” (page 65), not able to remember all the words and thus saying them fast so they’ll come out automatically. He makes an attempt at faith without making a commitment to it.

In his unswerving wickedness and vanity, Captain Ahab is a kind of anti-theist: his irreligiousness is horrifying to pious Starbuck. As for Pi, though in his maritime ordeal his faith is tested and he thus experiences temporary doubt, he manages to go to hell and back and, finally back on land in North America, he finds his faith restored and even stronger. Ahab’s impiousness, on the other hand, leads to his destruction.

Santiago’s use of prayer as a crutch, in contrast to both Pi and Ahab, results in his raised and ultimately frustrated hopes. Pi is willing to accept atheists for at least being committed to believing that there’s no God (Martel, pages 37-38), and while Pi would assuredly abominate the impiety of Ahab, it is especially the doubters, those committed neither to belief nor unbelief, like Santiago, with whom Pi is irritated. Santiago’s catching and losing of the marlin would seem to be his just desserts for his all-too-half-hearted prayers.

On page 66, Santiago wishes a flying fish will come on board that night, since they are “excellent to eat raw” and he wouldn’t have to cut one up. Within the same thought, he concludes with “Christ, I did not know [the marlin] was so big.” I find it significant that Santiago would speak of a fish and Christ (even if just swearing) in the same breath.

Recall that the fish is a Christian symbol, Ichthys, a Greek acronym for Iēsous Chrīstos Theoû Yἱός Sōtér, or “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Saviour.” That the fish in question is a flying fish reinforces such symbolic associations as Christ ascending to heaven or walking on water.

The multi-religious Pi is plagued with guilt over his killing of a flying fish (Martel, page 245). He feels “as guilty as Cain.” One might also think of Judas Iscariot’s guilt over betraying another fish, Christ, then killing himself (Acts 11:18).

In Moby-Dick, though Ishmael acknowledges that whales are, of course, mammals, he stubbornly insists on calling them “fish” in the “Cetology” chapter, using Jonah (who was swallowed by “a great fish”, which Ishmael identifies with a whale) as his trustworthy source. For the sake of the symbolic association, I’ll go along with Ishmael’s mischievous scholarship here, and thus relate this killing of fish with Ahab’s bloody lust for revenge.

In these three men’s respective attitudes toward the…fish?…we can see a parallel symbolic attitude toward religion, God, and Christ. In Ahab’s hatred of Moby Dick, we see anti-theist impiety. In Pi’s repentant feelings for the flying fish he’s killed, we see his earnest religiosity. In Santiago’s wish to kill and eat a flying fish, we see not Ahab’s malice, but just a sense of how religion has its uses.

Santiago is so tired from his efforts to reel in the giant, powerful marlin that he wishes he could sleep (page 66). He must save all his strength; this is why he wants to eat a flying fish. He wants to kill the marlin “in all his greatness and his glory”–how like the greatness and glory of God on the Cross, the Christ-like fish.

He wishes both he and the fish could sleep…like being asleep in Christ (1 Corinthians 15, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14). He would dream of the lions, as he’s done before and will do again, at the end of the story, after his disappointment with the marlin. “Why are the lions the main thing that is left?” he wonders.

Well, as with the fish, the lion is also a symbol of Christ, the lion of Judah (Revelation 5:5). You might also recall Aslan in C.S. Lewis‘s Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, published just two years before TOMATS. Santiago, being of little faith, can only dream of Christian ideas, and can pray only mechanically, not remembering all the words. His determination to catch the marlin is only physical and faithless, hence his absurdist failure.

Examples of injuries that Santiago suffers, those which can be symbolically associated with Christ’s Passion, include a cut the old man gets below his eye (page 52). Such a cut may remind us of the crown of thorns. When he rests against the wood of the bow just after he gets that cut, we’re reminded of Christ resting against the wood of the rood.

Later, on page 66, he advises himself once again to “Rest gently now against the wood and think of nothing.” Just as with dreaming of the Christ-like lions, resting against the Cross-like wood is symbolically a leaning on the crutch of the Church, but, being without thought, it’s a mentally lazy, passive reliance on faith without putting the kind of commitment to that faith that Pi would put into it. Hence, Santiago fails in the end. The mini-tragedy here is in how Santiago suffers like Christ, but that suffering is all in absurdist vain.

A little later on, Santiago switches from one hero (Christ) to another (DiMaggio). On pages 67-68, he thinks of the Big Leagues (Gran Ligas), the New York Yankees and “the Tigres of Detroit.” Just as religion is the opium of the people, so is the hero worship of American pop culture, so fully appropriated by the Cubans that Santiago even mixes a bit of Spanish into the baseball league and its teams. These idols of his have a way of distracting people like him from what they should be focusing on: overcoming imperialist hegemony. Pressing on the wood and not thinking is just a distraction, just as wanting to be “worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly” is (page 68).

DiMaggio “does all things perfectly” just as Christ does, for our “Heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48) Would “the great DiMaggio…stay with a fish as long as [Santiago] will stay with this one?” (page 68) Just as people often ask, ‘What would Jesus do?’ in any difficult situation, so does Santiago ask, ‘What would DiMaggio do?’ in this difficulty of catching the marlin. DiMaggio is like Christ, because for Santiago, it’s all about worshipping an idealization rather than fully using one’s own agency.

During his sleep the night before he went out in his skiff on his eighty-fifth ‘lucky’ day, he dreamed of “lions on the beach.” (page 25) He dreams of them again (page 81). In his dream, “he rested his chin on the wood of the bows…” As we can see, the lions and wood are reinforcing the Christian symbolism, and in his passive, dreaming state, this Christianity truly is the opium of the people, a drug to take one’s mind off of one’s suffering.

As he continues struggling with the marlin later on, Santiago says, “God, help me endure. I’ll say a hundred Our Fathers and a hundred Hail Marys. But I cannot say them now.” (page 87) He speaks as though he’d make a deal with God in order to catch the marlin, but faith doesn’t work that way. One doesn’t believe as thanks for getting what one wants, and one’s faith isn’t supposed to be dependent on whether or not one has good fortune. He won’t even pray now. Small wonder he fails in the end.

When, on page 92, Santiago says, “Do you have to kill me too?” in response to the marlin’s making the catch so difficult, and he thinks, “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”, we see yet more comparison and contrast with Ahab, who would be killed by the whale, and even willingly, yet Santiago sees the marlin as his brother and doesn’t hate it, as Ahab hates Moby Dick.

Once Santiago has finally caught the marlin, he imagines “the great DiMaggio would be proud of [him] today” (page 97), since the culturally imperialist object of his worship is on a level with that other opium of the people, Christ…though Santiago never gets around to praying those ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys.

With the marlin lashed to the side of the skiff, Santiago wonders if he’s bringing it in, or vice versa (page 99). It’s rather like Ahab caught in his harpoon and stuck to the side of the whale as it swims away. Still, Santiago and the marlin are brothers, not mortal enemies, as are Ahab and the white whale.

After killing the first shark to bite at the marlin, Santiago implicitly imagines his use of his harpoon with which to brain the shark to death as being like DiMaggio hitting a ball with a baseball bat (pages 103-104). It makes him feel as if he were identified with his hero, an imitator of him, almost like an imitator of Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1).

Santiago believes it’s a sin not to hope (pages 104-105), just as he who doubts is damned (Romans 14:23). Of course, killing the marlin may have been a sin (page 105); but since everything is a sin in Santiago’s mind, in a Godless world, he feels he shouldn’t think of sin. He can assuage his guilt, however, by reminding himself that DiMaggio’s father was a fisherman. He feels guilt that he killed the marlin out of pride, though, not just because it’s his work, so he can’t stop thinking about sin.

So when two sharks come after the marlin, he must feel as though the eating away of it is his punishment (page 107). Indeed, he is “feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood”, like Christ on the Cross.

Back on shore and with Manolin, who has been weeping over the disappointing sight of the marlin’s mere skeleton lashed to the side of the skiff, Santiago can at least enjoy the pleasure of having another human being to talk to (page 124), as opposed to his loneliness at sea. The boy wants to fish with the old man again, regardless of how unlucky he is. After all, companionship is more important than success at fishing.

Santiago’s inability to bring the marlin onshore intact is related to his shaky faith in God, but his weak faith is not his fault. In the mundane banality of an absurdist universe–as opposed to the grandiose, pantheist divinity of Pi’s universe on the one extreme, or the melodrama of Ahab’s Satanic drive to self-destruction on the other–there is no God and there is thus no meaning in the world. The absurdity of life, as seen in Sisyphus happily rolling the boulder up the hill again and again, is in making attempts to find meaning where there is none, just like Santiago’s half-assed attempts, if any, to pray to God. We try and fail, then try and fail again, just like praying over and over, with no answer from a God that’s dead.

Yet we keep trying all the same, as Santiago will keep on trying to catch a fish.

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, New York, Scribner, 1952