How his personal life reflect in ‘Old man and the
sea’:
Many
parallels have been drawn between Ernest Hemingway’s life and fiction. Scholars
generally agree that Nicks Adams is the character who most closely represents
Hemingway the man. There is some dissension, however regarding whether it is in
fact Hemingway’s personality or simply his experiences which are being
personified by his character. Most of Hemingway’s fiction is based on his own
personal experience. When creating the fiction, he invents from this
experience. He suffered(injury) at the age eighteen when he served as an
ambulance driver for the Italian army, and how and why this episode resurfaces
in his literature.
What was his inspiration for ‘old man and the
sea’? :
Gregoria Fuentes, Hemingway’s long time
fishing companion and first mate of the pillar, had this to say about his
friend’s possible inspiration:
“When we went to sea, we found the old man and the sea. We
found him adrift on a little boat with a big fish tied there and when Hemingway
went to write he wanted to give it a name and I said why don’t you name it the
old man and the sea”.
If we
take Fuentes at his word, then this was Hemingway’s inspiration and the old man
he saw that day became a model for the old man in the book. Everything that
occurs in the story was likely invented by Hemingway. Writing remains an act of
invention. It may initially be based on actual experience, but to make it truly
fiction and to define it as such, it must be invented. Hemingway knew and
understood that better than anyone. This is one of the many reasons why his
work endures.
Hemingway
created an image of himself that was larger than life; literally-people always
thought he was taller than his actual height of six feet. His reputation,
however, was no accident, and in maintaining Hemingway the myth he alienated
many people who had to deal with Hemingway the man. He exaggerated or outright
lied about some of his exploits in hunting and war. He had great difficulty to
maintaining friendship and marriages. Though he professed not to care for
praise, he sought it out and got cranky when it wasn’t given. He could be
charming and charismatic or bullying and boorish-often to the same people. And
his obsession with manliness-well, let’s just say that the guy bad a few issues
with his mom. And though his writing championed those who never gave up, in the
end he surrendered in his own battle against depression, ending his life in suicide.
But as wrote in ‘old man and the sea’, “man can be destroyed, but never
defeated”. More than forty tears after his death, Hemingway’s work lives on his
own bibliography and in the countless authors he inspired.
After
his first success in the literary world, Hemingway married and divorced three
times. His fourth wife was Mary Welsh. During the 1930s he spent time in Spain
and Africa and resided in key West, Florida, where he gained a reputation as a
sportsman and athlete. He fought bulls in Spain, haunted in Africa and fished
in Florida. The main character of Santiago in old man and the sea was based on
someone he encountered during his fishing adventures on the Gulf Stream. While
on his boat, he and his friend Carlos
Gutierrez encountered a fisherman and a boy being dragged through the sea
in a rickety boat, struggling against a big fish. The old man refused any help
from Hemingway and his skipper. The story first appeared as an anecdote in an
article in Esquire called “on the blue water” in April 1936.
The
tale of the old, courageous fisher man is also said by critics to reflect the
author himself. Gary Brenner described Santiago as the aging author Hemingway
and the marlin as his noble and beautiful published works. Other recognizes
Hemingway’s love of gallantry. Sean O’Faolain is quoted by Carlos Baker as
saying that Hemingway trotted the globe “in search of the flame of the spirit
in men and beasts”. In old man and the sea, this flame is a characteristic of
both Santiago and the marlin.
‘Old
man and the sea’ was Hemingway’s last published work and he received the Nobel
Prize in 1954. Towards the end of his life, he suffered a lot of pain-high
blood pressure, enlarged liver and withdrawal. Ultimately, he was unable to
endure his pain. Then he was driven to suicide on July 2, 1961.
Hemingway’s
books seem to have a similarity to Hemingway himself. His code heroes may have
been previously wounded or gone through some sort of an ordeal, and so they
could have a drinking problem, or a problem of sleeping. They seem to be
disillusioned, and or self-oriented, and are not usually loyal to a large
cause, but rather a small group of people or a relatively small idea or thing.
Hemingway
once said, “As you get older, it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of
necessary”. He knew this because he actually invented his famous code hero. His
code hero was a macho man that indulged in liquor, women, and food, and usually
did not fear god. While reading ‘old man and the sea’ , the reader is not
exposed to the usual Hemingway code hero. He creates an aging hero that proves
to be the opposite of the normal code hero by his disinterest in physical
pleasure, the presence of religion, and the presence of a companion.
He also
uses the character of old man, marlin as a symbol and also there other many
symbols. For example, the marlin represents strength, beauty and the last
challenge we all go though. The lions in his dreams resemble youth, freedom and
also strength. Santiago, the old man, symbolizes Christ in many ways.
This
book also takes place in the 1940s when Joe
DiMaggio played baseball. The old man, a fisherman, lived in Cuba and
fishes in the warm gulf waters. Cuba is a perfect setting for the book. During
this time period many impoverished people lived in Cuba. Fishing was the
primary way to earn a living. Marlins are found mainly in the gulf and it was important
for Hemingway to create realistic character that would actually be found in
that location. He is also drawing upon his own experiences to make the story
more realistic. Despite commonly of being in places in places near the equator
this is very harsh place to live.
Santiago’s
battle with the fish produces myriad biblical images and while most obvious are
Santiago-as-Christ, other exist as
well. An arvin well, for example, provides a Santiago-as-Cain analogy: “Repeatedly, (Santiago) addresses the fish as
‘brother’…..yet, at the same time, he is relentlessly determined to capture and
kill the marlin, as Cain killed his brother”. Wells furnishes another
provocative analogy by equating the fish as Christ and Santiago as the
crucifier. During the battle, Santiago exclaims, “Christ …..I did not know he
was so big….I’ll will kill him though….in all his greatness and his glory”. He
states, “significantly this is the only places in the story where the
expletive, Christ is used and the echo in the (last) sentence is
unmistakable…for thine is the power and the glory forever”. John Hamilton
further illustrates this point by equating the fish with the Christian acronym,
or lchthus (Jesus Christ, son of god, and savior): “it is inconceivable for one
as widely read and travelled in fishing and Christian circles as was
Hemingway….not to have become familiar with the fish as a god-man symbol”. When
Santiago finally kills the fish, he thrusts the harpoon into “the fish’s side
just behind the great chest fin”, thus reminding us of Christ’s side being
pierced while on the cross.
On the level of significance, Santiago is Harry Morgan alive again
and grown old; for what comes to Morgan in a sudden and unexpected revelation
as he lies dying is the matrix of the old fisherman’s climatic experience.
Since 1937, Hemingway has been increasingly concerned with the relationship
between individualism and interdependence; and ‘old man and the sea’ is the
culminating expression of this concern in its reflection of Hemingway’s mature
view of the tragic irony of man’s fate: that no abstraction can bring man an
awareness and understanding of the solidarity and interdependence without which
life is impossible; he must learn it, as it has always been truly learned,
through the agony of active and isolated individualism in a universe which
dooms such individualism. From beginning to end, the theme of solidarity and
interdependence pervades the action and provides the structural framework
within which the old man’s heroic individualism and his love for his fellow
creatures appear and function and which gives them their ultimate significance
Then
there are the qualities which define man’s true place in a world of violence
and death indifferent to him, and they are the context which gives the
experience of the old fisherman its ultimate significance as the reflection of
Hemingway’s culminating concept of the human condition-his tragic vision of
man. For in his understanding that “it is enough to live on the sea and kill
our true brothers”, the fellow creatures who share life with us and whom he
loves, the old man is expressing Hemingway’s conviction that despite the tragic
necessity of such a condition, man has a place in the world. And in his
realization that in going alone and too far out, “beyond all people in the
world”, he has ruined both himself and also the great fish, the old man
reflects Hemingway’s feeling that in his individualism and his pride and his
need, man inevitably goes beyond his true place in the world and thereby brings
violence and destruction on himself and others. Yet in going out too far and
alone, Santiago has found his greatest strength
and courage and dignity and nobility and love, and in this he express
Hemingway’s view of the ultimate tragic irony of man’s fate: that only through
the isolated individualism and the pride which drive him beyond his true place
in life does man develop the qualities and the wisdom which teach him the sin
of such individualism and pride and which bring him the deepest understanding
of himself and of his place in the world. Thus, in accepting his world for what
it is and in learning to live in it, Hemingway has achieved a tragic but
ennobling vision of man which is in the tradition of Sophocles, Christ,
Melville, and Conrad.
It is
not enough, to point out, as P. Weeks
does, that”from the first eight words of ‘old man and the sea’ ….we are
squarely confronted with a world in which man’s isolation is the most insistent
truth”. Truth which is at the same time paradox, for Santiago is profoundly
aware that “no man was ever alone on the sea”. Leo Gurko feels it is
–“the culmination of Hemingway’s long search for disengagement from the social
world and total entry into the natural”. If the old man leaves the society to
go “far out” and “beyond all people in the world”, the consciousness of society
and of his relationship to it are never for long out of his thoughts; and in
the end, of course, he return to his “good town”, where he finds it pleasant
“to have someone to talk to instead of speaking only to himself and to the
sea”. To go no further than Santiago’s isolation, therefore or to treat it, as
Weeks does, as a theme in opposition to Hemingway’s concern with society is to
miss the deepest level of significance both in this novel and in Hemingway’s
writing generally.
Edger
Johnson has shown, the true direction of Hemingway’s thought and art
from the beginning and especially since 1937 has been a return to society- not
in terms of any particular social or political doctrine, but in the broad sense
of human solidarity and interdependence. If he began by making “a separate
peace” and by going, like Santiago, “far out” beyond society, like the old man,
too, he has come back, through Harry
Morgan’s “’no man alone’”, Philip
Rawlings’s and Robert Jordan’s
“no man is an island” , and Santiago’s
“no man is ever alone on the sea” with a
deepened insight into its nature and values and a profound awareness of his
relationship to it as an individual”.
In the
process, strangely enough- or perhaps it is not strange at all-he has come back
from Frederic Henry’s rejection of
all abstract values to a reiteration for our time of mankind’s oldest and
noblest moral principle. As James B. Colvert points out,
Hemingway is a moralist: heir, like his world, to the destruction by science
and empiricism of nineteenth-century value assumption, he rejects equally these
assumption and the principle underlying them-that intellectual moral
abstraction possess independent super sensual existence. Turning from the
result nihilism, he goes to experience in the actual world of hostility, violence,
and destruction to find in the world which destroyed the old values a basis for
new ones-and it is precisely here, Colvert suggests, in reflecting the central
moral problem of his world, that Hemingway is significant moralist.
But out
of this concern with action and conduct in a naturalistic universe, Hemingway
has not evolved new moral values; rather, he has reaffirmed man’s oldest
ones-courage, love, humility, solidarity, and interdependence. It is their
basis which is new-a basis not in supernaturalism or abstraction but hard-won
through actual experience in a naturalistic universe which is at best
indifferent to man and his values. E.M. Halliday observe, that “we are
part of a universe offering no assurance beyond the grave, and we are to make what
we can of life by a pragmatic ethic spun bravely out of man himself in full and
steady cognizance that the end is darkness.”
Though
perfectly realized symbolism and irony, then Hemingway has beautifully and
movingly spun out an old fisherman’s great trial just such a pragmatic ethic
and its basis in an essentially tragic vision of man; and in this reaffirmation
of man’s most cherished values and their reaffirmation in the terms of our time
rests the deepest and the enduring significance of ‘old man and the sea’.
Hemingway –Santiago:
Santiago
|
Hemingway
|
Is a perfectionist about all details of fishing
|
He created his writing with immense care
|
Has endured a lengthy spell during which he could catch no fish
|
Had gone a decade without publishing a highly acclaimed novel
|
Is a no longer regarded by the villages as an undisputed master
fisherman
|
His reputation as a master of his craft had been questioned by some
critics
|
Struggles with effects of aging on his professional abilities
|
He had recently turned fifty and begun to question whether he was
past his prime
|
Santiago is alone; his wife is dead
|
He had experienced the death of several people close to him. his
mother Grace Hemingway; his former wife and the mother of his children,
Pauline phieffer it; and his publisher, Charles Scribner, all died during the
year that Hemingway was writing ‘old man and the sea’
|
A final
comparison between Santiago and Hemingway lies in the fact that they both face
“sharks”. For Hemingway, these would be the critics, who, with their bad
review, could destroy his achievement.
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