I read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea with friends last month. It was my first time. We found the essential story of catching a prize-worthy fish fairly gripping. I’ll summarize it quickly with spoilers.
Santiago is a poorer-than-most Cuban fisherman whose sail resembles a flag of defeat. The community has decided he is unlucky for catching nothing over the last 84 days at the start of the novella. But what is he going to do–sit on the beach and starve? With the encouragement of a neighbor boy who is as a grandson to him, he goes into the sea again, intending to go farther than all the other fishermen. He does so and hooks a gorgeous and enormous Marlin that takes him the rest of the story to pull in.
The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again.
Christians will notice the explicit Christ imagery in the story’s second half. Santiago is wounded with stripes on his back and pain like a nail through the hand. In the final pages, he carries his mast on his shoulder toward his hut and stumbles. He lies in his bed, arms outstretched, palms up. What does this mean, because the old man doesn’t redeem himself or anyone else? Perhaps the old man’s suffering and endurance is meant to be the ultimate a man can give.
His suffering is the cost of pursuing something great. He challenges a noble beast, his equal in some respects, and conquers it. He makes mistakes along the way and considers whether some of them are actual sins (though he claims to disbelieve in sin), but he achieves his goal nonetheless.
At least, he technically does. Before he can haul this trophy fish back, sharks take all but the skeleton.
His neighbors are amazed at what he has done. The boy is relieved he has returned after three days. But his victory is hollow without the meat and the money from its sale.
While Santiago is still in the fight with the Marlin, he says this:
But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures.
The Old Man and the Sea, 65
“I told the boy I was a strange old man,” he said.
“Now is when I must prove it.”
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.
There’s truth in that. We only have today. Yesterday still counts for something in some matters, diminishing as the clock continues to spin, but now is the time to love, hope, and do the good we can. I believe that, but I don’t know how much my life proves that belief. I have vague regrets about misspent time. That’s probably a sin. Santiago would be no help talking it over with me.
In an article on Hemingway and the Gospel, Brian Douglas wrote, “One of Hemingway’s editors, Maxwell Perkins, said of him, ‘If the function of a writer is to reveal reality, no one ever so completely performed it.’ Unfortunately, Hemingway’s insistence on telling the truth does not provide his reader with many happy endings. As Hemingway saw it, life is ultimately always tragic.”
If there is no hope of life beyond the grave, the sea will always win regardless the victories of the day.