Novel: The Old Man and the Sea

Overview
Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea follows Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without a catch. His young apprentice, Manolin, has been forced by his parents to work on another boat, but he remains devoted to the old man. On the eighty-fifth day Santiago sets out alone into the Gulf Stream, determined to end his unlucky streak. The novella distills a life’s worth of endurance, pride, and grace into a spare narrative of struggle between a fisherman and a great marlin, unfolding as a meditation on what it means to be tested, to suffer, and to retain dignity in the face of apparent loss.

Plot Summary
Before dawn, Santiago rows far beyond the other boats, his skiff carrying carefully baited lines at different depths. By noon a massive marlin takes one of his baits and begins to tow the skiff out to sea. Santiago braces the line across his back and hands, enduring burning cords and cramps but refusing to let the fish sound or break free. The marlin’s strength and stamina keep Santiago awake through the night; he eats raw tuna and a dolphin to keep up his strength, speaks aloud to himself to focus, and addresses the fish as a worthy brother. He remembers a youthful arm-wrestling victory and the lions he once saw on African beaches, dream-images of vigor and promised return.

On the second night the marlin surfaces and leaps, revealing a tremendous size. At sunrise on the third day it begins to circle. Santiago, exhausted and bleeding, hauls the line in short turns until the fish comes close enough to strike. He drives his harpoon into the marlin’s heart, then lashes the towering body alongside the skiff. The victory is solitary and austere, born of skill, will, and respect.

Heading home, Santiago soon faces predators drawn by the blood trail. A great mako shark attacks first; he kills it with the harpoon but loses the weapon and much of the marlin’s flesh. More sharks arrive, shovel-nosed scavengers and others, and he lashes a knife to an oar, then fights with a club, then with the tiller itself as each improvised weapon is lost or broken. By nightfall the marlin is reduced to a skeleton. Santiago reaches the harbor in darkness, shoulders his mast up the hill to his shack, and collapses into sleep. Morning brings onlookers who measure the immense spine and tail and tourists who mistake it for a shark. Manolin finds the old man, weeps at his wounds, and vows to fish with him again. Santiago sleeps and dreams of the lions.

Themes
The novella frames human struggle as a test of character rather than a contest of victory. Santiago’s pride is not boastful but a disciplined standard that obliges him to go “beyond all people.” He loves the marlin even as he kills it, seeing in the fish a mirror of his own nobility. Defeat is complicated: the old man returns without flesh to sell, yet he preserves an inner triumph, endurance without bitterness, skill without cruelty, and a code that asserts a man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Style and Symbolism
Hemingway’s lean prose, rhythmic repetition, and clear declarative sentences carry biblical and epic undertones. The skiff, the line, and the marlin are concrete objects and living presences, yet they also figure a solitary vocation, a cruciform burden, and the cost of excellence. The lions on the beach seal the final image: youth and freedom renewed in dream, not as escape but as the enduring horizon of the spirit.