THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA : ERNEST HEMINGWAY

REVISION MATERIAL FOR ENGLISH GCSE

Use this material to take you back to the text of the story and to encourage you to think about it in structured ways.

We will work through some of these things before the end of term but there will be plenty more for you to do during the holiday.

Tasks you need to do are in bold italics : e.g. -Find more examples of your own of everything listed.

Different culture

The question you answer may well require you (or give you opportunities) to show your understanding of the Different Culture the story presents.

Find examples of all of the following to illustrate the life of Santiago and his community.

Poverty : e.g. Santiago’s shack – page 10; water-supply page 14.

Look for details of his diet, his clothes, and his possessions.

What are the most important possessions in Santiago’s life?

What does he value?

How do these things define him?

Santiago’s values

Religion : e.g. pages 26, 46, 63

Santiago’s machismo : e.g. : ‘pain does not matter to a man’- page 61

One expression of his machismo is his idolisation of Joe DiMaggio – the great baseball player who was coming to the end of his career when the story was written and who played in great pain from the bone spur in his heel : - e.g. page 70.

The absence of women in the story – Santiago’s wife is dead and his misogyny is seen in his abusive terms for sharks – page 73 – and the Portuguese man-of-war - page 25. The dominant female in the story is the SEA – who is seen as a flighty, flirtatious and unreliable lover – pages 20-21.

How does this affect the core of the story in S struggle with the sea?

His fellow fishermen : e.g. They see Santiago as salao - bad luck - page 5

e.g. Santiago trusts them but still takes his gear home – page 9

How the fish market works : page 6-7.

His relationship with Manolin : e.g. how M serves him – page 13, 18-19, page 89

The generosity of his community : e.g. Martin feeds him – page 13

Their reactions to what Santiago has done - e.g. the search : pages 83 and 90

The failure of outsiders to understand what Santiago has done - the American tourists : page 92

Above all, perhaps, there is Santiago’s sense of being part of a wider community of living things - even turtles as on page 26 - and with the sea and the fish.

How does his way of life on LAND help produce the attitude to his place in the world that he feels when at SEA?

The Story’s Structure

Make sure you can recognise some of the main ways Hemingway organises the story and consider how they affect your understanding of it.

This story offers several structural patterns :

1) A Voyage – this is very often the model for a story in which the hero discovers the truth about himself

How does this apply to Santiago?

2) Land-Sea-Land Land represents Santiago’s place in his community and his relationships – especially with Manolin.

The Land offers security but it is also where Santiago suffers the disgrace of salao.

Is his return in a sense a return to die? (page 91).

Or is there renewal, perhaps through his apprentice, Manolin?

The Sea is the place for the individual’s combat with huge natural forces, where Santiago seems to triumph only to fail at the end. He cannot defeat the sea, but he can struggle and endure to the end : A man can be destroyed but not defeated. – page 75.

3) Together-Alone-Together : This parallels Land-Sea-Land but again allows Hemingway to reveal the interior monologue of Santiago as he reacts to events at sea and talks to himself – page 27. Together with others (especially Manolin) on land we see him as part of a community - e.g. page 18. See Different Cultures.

4) Tragedy : Some people see the story as following a tragic pattern in which the hero’s flaw, in this case Santiago’s pride in his skills, knowledge and technique, leads him to challenge the natural (or divine) law. His destruction is therefore inevitable : ‘He knew quite well the pattern of what would happen…’(Page 75). ‘Was it a sin to kill the fish?’ Santiago wonders – page 76. It may be that Santiago will die as a result – ‘something in my chest was broken’ (p.91) Is this like the marlin’s heart into which he stuck the harpoon? Or is it that : A man can be destroyed but not defeated…- page .

5) Finally, there is the 5-day pattern of events passing through day and night in each case. At night when he sleeps we see Santiago’s dreams but even events in the day seem dreamlike until he is sailing home – page 71.

Hemingway’s Style

Hemingway’s prose style has been described as ‘spare, compact and yet full of meaning through symbolism’.

Hemingway himself said he wrote in the ‘iceberg’ principle: ‘The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the processes of the way they made their living, were born, educated, bore children etc. …I have tried to do something else….I have tried to eliminate everything necessary to conveying the experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened.’

Allegory (in which a story is told through symbolic representation and transposed to different circumstances.)

In this reading, some see Santiago catching his fish as Hemingway, who had had little success as a writer for a long while, trying to ‘land’ the great book and that the story therefore tells of his struggle to do so, his skill, his craft, his luck etc. They also see the sharks as literary critics who destroy what the writer has done yet he, of course, somehow emerges greater than they are.

This is a rather limiting reading of the story though. Perhaps a more fruitful way is a –

Fable or Parable – that is a story with a moral that applies outside the framework of the narrative.

Is this a modern Icarus story, of a man who ‘went out too far’ (page 87) and who is destroyed by challenging the natural law of the sea?

Do you see other morals demonstrated in the story? What about the crucifixion imagery associated with Santiago – e.g. pages 78 and 88.

Hemingway’s Language

Remember, one of the questions will offer you a short passage for detailed comment before you expand to look at other related passages that fit the question, so CLOSE READING is one of the skills you need to show.

The opening sentence’s directness sets up the whole story and is characteristic of Hemingway’s use of language:

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

It is apparently direct and factual but it is almost always open to symbolic interpretation. Santiago’s eyes being ‘the colour of the sea’ links him with it – as does the title - and his patched sail is ‘like the flag of permanent defeat.’ - as is he.The skiff is like Santiago. It returns damaged but mendable. Is this true of him too?

Much of the story is descriptive, usually with a lot of close detail, but the adjective is not used as much as would seem likely. Rather it is the verbs – the actions – that are most important. : ‘In the dark the man could FEEL the morning coming and as he rowed he HEARD the trembling sound as flying fish left the water…’ page 20.

Look at the description of the first sight of the fish – pages 44-5.

It has four sentences of increasing length as more clauses linked just by and are added. The first sentence is a narrative statement. Each sentence then adds an accumulation of details before a final sentence adds imagery to sum up the effect : the baseball bat…the rapier…the scythe-like blade….

Another example of this is his baiting of his hooks on page 21. Try to see this pattern here and elsewhere. It recurs often.

Short sentences are very common – they are part of this directness/simplicity.

Look at how often we get objective (factual) description that then blends into Santiago’s thoughts or feelings, sometimes by saying ‘he thought’, but sometimes without any warning or indication.

Try the rest of page 45 as an example of this, then find some of your own.

Hemingway does not comment on the action as a narrator, it is always done through Santiago’s own mind or just occasionally through Manolin.

The narrative consists of : description of actions dialogue

and interior monologue from Santiago when he is alone.

Themes

Now this is all your own work – with just a few starting-points.

Find some examples of your own for ALL of the following :

Santiago’s Skill and Craft as a fisherman e.g. 22, 30, 38 etc.

Santiago’s knowledge of the sea : e.g. 20, 71

How Santiago is described physically: e.g . page 12, and S on his own body – p. 41-2, 44

Santiago’s character – his pride, his endurance, his courage – e.g. page 81

Santiago’s suffering : e.g. page 64

The importance of luck – e.g. page 11, 22, 30, 85

The relationship between the old man and the fish- e.g. pages 67-9, 72, 84, 91

Consider why each of these is important to the story and how Hemingway presents his ideas through them.

Bibliography

Some of the ideas in this guide are taken from :Bloom’s Reviews of The Old Man and the Sea - edited by Harold Bloom

AF : December 2005