   #copyright

The Old Man and the Sea

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Novels

   CAPTION: The Old Man and the Sea

   Original book cover
     Author   Ernest Hemingway
    Country   United States
    Language  English
    Genre(s)  Novel
   Publisher  Charles Scribner's Sons
    Released  September 8, 1952
   Media Type Print ( hardback and paperback)
      ISBN    978-0-684-80122-3

   The Old Man and the Sea is a novella by Ernest Hemingway written in
   Cuba in 1951 and published in 1952. It was the last major work of
   fiction to be produced by Hemingway and published in his lifetime. One
   of his most famous works, it centers upon an aging Cuban fisherman who
   struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Though it has
   been the subject of disparate criticism, it is noteworthy in twentieth
   century fiction and in Hemingway's canon, reaffirming his worldwide
   literary prominence and significant in his selection for the Nobel
   Prize in Literature in 1954.

Background and publication

   Most biographers maintain that the years following Hemingway's
   publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940 until 1952 were the
   bleakest in his literary career. The novel Across the River and Into
   the Trees (1950) was almost unanimously disparaged by critics as
   self-parody. Evidently his participation as an Allied correspondent in
   World War II did not yield fruits equivalent to those wrought of his
   experiences in World War I ( A Farewell to Arms, 1929) or the Spanish
   Civil War (For Whom the Bell Tolls).

   Hemingway had initially planned to use Santiago's story, which became
   The Old Man and the Sea, as part of a larger work, which he referred to
   as "The Sea Book." Some aspects of it did appear in the posthumously
   published Islands in the Stream. Positive feedback he received on
   Santiago's story led him to write it as an independent work. The book
   is a novella because it has no chapters or parts and is a bit longer
   than a short story.

   The novel first appeared, in its 26,500-word entirety, as part of the
   September 1, 1952 edition of Life magazine. 5.3 million copies of that
   issue were sold within two days. The majority of concurrent criticism
   was extravagantly positive, while a streak of dissenting criticism has
   since emerged.

   The title was misprinted on the cover of an early edition as The Old
   Men and the Sea.

Inspiration for character

   While Hemingway was living in Cuba beginning in 1940 with his third
   wife Martha Gellhorn, one of his favorite pastimes was to sail and fish
   in his boat, named the Pilar. General biographical consensus holds that
   the model for Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea was, at least in
   part, the Cuban fisherman Gregorio Fuentes.

   Fuentes, born in 1897 on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, migrated to
   Cuba when he was six years old and met Hemingway there in 1928. In the
   1930s, Hemingway hired him to look after his boat. During Hemingway's
   Cuban years a strong friendship formed between Hemingway and Fuentes.
   For almost thirty years, Fuentes served as the captain of the Pilar;
   this included time during which Hemingway did not live in Cuba.

   Fuentes, suffering from cancer, died in 2002; he was 104 years old.
   Prior to his death, he donated Hemingway's Pilar to the Cuban
   government. He never read The Old Man and the Sea.

Plot summary

   Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

   The Old Man and the Sea recounts an epic battle between an old,
   experienced fisherman and a giant marlin said to be the largest catch
   of his life.

   It opens by explaining that the fisherman, who is named Santiago (but
   only directly referred to outside of dialogue as "the old man"), has
   gone 84 days without catching a fish. He is apparently so unlucky that
   his young apprentice, Manolin, has been forbidden by his parents to
   sail with the old man and been ordered to fish with more successful
   fishermen. Still dedicated to the old man, however, the boy visits
   Santiago's shack each night, hauling back his fishing gear, feeding
   him, and discussing American baseball—most notably Santiago's idol, Joe
   DiMaggio. Santiago tells Manolin that on the next day, he will venture
   far out into the Gulf to fish, confident that his unlucky streak is
   near its end.

   Thus on the eighty-fifth day, Santiago sets out alone, taking his skiff
   far into the Gulf. He sets his lines and, by noon of the first day, a
   big fish that he is sure is a marlin takes his bait. Unable to pull in
   the great marlin, Santiago instead finds the fish pulling his skiff.
   Two days and two nights pass in this manner, during which the old man
   bears the tension of the line with his body. Though he is wounded by
   the struggle and in pain, Santiago expresses a compassionate
   appreciation for his adversary, often referring to him as a brother.

   On the third day of the ordeal, the fish begins to circle the skiff,
   indicating his tiredness to the old man. Santiago, now completely worn
   out and almost in delirium, finds the strength to stab the marlin with
   a harpoon and kill him during one of his great lunges out of the water.

   Santiago straps the marlin to his skiff and heads home, thinking about
   the high price the fish will bring him at the market and how many
   people he will feed. The old man determines that because of the fish's
   great dignity, no one will be worthy of eating the marlin.

   While Santiago continues his journey back to the shore, sharks are
   attracted to the trail of blood left by the marlin in the water. The
   first, a great mako shark, Santiago kills with his harpoon, losing that
   weapon in the process. He makes a new harpoon by strapping his knife to
   the end of an oar to help ward off the next line of sharks; in total,
   seven sharks are slain. But by night, the sharks have devoured the
   marlin's entire carcass, leaving only its skeleton. The old man
   castigates himself for sacrificing the marlin. Finally reaching the
   shore before dawn on the next day, he struggles on the way to his
   shack, carrying the heavy mast on his shoulder. Once home, he slumps
   onto his bed and enters a very deep sleep.

   Ignorant of the old man's journey, a group of fishermen gathers the
   next day around the boat where the fish's skeleton is still attached.
   Tourists at the nearby café mistakenly take it for a shark. Manolin,
   worried during the old man's endeavor, cries upon finding him safe
   asleep. The boy brings him newspapers and coffee. When the old man
   wakes, they promise to fish together once again. Upon his return to
   sleep, Santiago dreams of lions on the African beach.
   Spoilers end here.

Literary significance & criticism

   One of the most celebrated favorable critical readings of the
   novella—and one which has defined analytical considerations since—came
   in 1957 with Joseph Waldmeir's essay entitled "Confiteor Hominem:
   Ernest Hemingway's Religion of Man." Perhaps the most memorable claim
   therein is his answer to the rhetorical question,

          Just what is the book's message?
          The answer assumes a third level on which The Old Man and the
          Sea must be read—as a sort of allegorical commentary on all his
          previous work, by means of which it may be established that the
          religious overtones of The Old Man and the Sea are not peculiar
          to that book among Hemingway's works, and that Hemingway has
          finally taken the decisive step in elevating what might be
          called his philosophy of Manhood to the level of a religion.
          (351)

   Waldmeir was one of the most prominent critics to wholly consider the
   function of the novella's Christian imagery, made most evident through
   Santiago's blatant reference to the crucifixion following his sighting
   of the sharks that reads:

          Ay, he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and
          perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make,
          involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into
          the wood. (Hemingway 107)

   Waldmeir analyzes this line, supplemented with other instances of
   similar symbolism, in such a way that allows him to claim that The Old
   Man and the Sea was a seminal work in raising what he calls Hemingway's
   "philosophy of Manhood" to a religious level. Regardless of whether one
   agrees with this logic, his hallmark criticism, curiously sycophantic
   in tone, stands as one of the most durable, positive treatments of the
   novella.

   On the other hand, one of the most outspoken critics who has emerged in
   the camp of dissenting opinion of the work is Robert P. Weeks. His
   notorious 1962 piece, "Fakery in The Old Man and the Sea," presents a
   series of points that he claims show how the novella is a weak and
   unexpected divergence from the typical, realistic Hemingway. In
   juxtaposing this novella against Hemingway's previous works, he
   explains that

          The difference, however, in the effectiveness with which
          Hemingway employs this characteristic device in his best work
          and in The Old Man and the Sea is illuminating. The work of
          fiction in which Hemingway devoted the most attention to natural
          objects, The Old Man and the Sea, is pieced out with an
          extraordinary quantity of fakery, extraordinary because one
          would expect to find no inexactness, no romanticizing of natural
          objects in a writer who loathed W.H. Hudson, could not read
          Thoreau, deplored Melville's rhetoric in Moby Dick, and who was
          himself criticized by other writers, notably Faulkner, for his
          devotion to the facts and his unwillingness to "invent." (188)

   While his dismissal is mostly limited to the story at hand (he refers
   to previous Hemingway works as "earlier glories"), the evident range of
   critical interpretations is a curiosity for a work so widely renowned
   as a masterpiece.

Awards and nominations

   The Old Man and the Sea led to numerous accolades for Hemingway,
   including the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He also earned the Award
   of Merit Medal for the Novel from the American Academy of Letters that
   same year. Most prestigiously, the Nobel Prize in Literature came in
   1954, "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently
   demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he
   has exerted on contemporary style."

Film and television adaptations

   Of the several films that have been made based on the novella, the most
   notable, produced in 1958, stars Spencer Tracy as Santiago and Felipe
   Pazos as Manolin. It was adapted by Peter Viertel and directed by John
   Sturges, Henry King (uncredited) and Fred Zinnemann (uncredited). It
   won the Academy Award for Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy
   Picture, and was nominated in the categories of Best Actor in a Leading
   Role (Spencer Tracy) and Best Cinematography. It should be noted that
   Hemingway thought that Tracy was (literally) unfit for the role, having
   been known to call Tracy a "fat lard" among other names. The small boat
   used by Tracy in the film was built at the Havana Shipyards, Astilleros
   Palmer, where some of the movie's scenes were filmed.

   Another prominent version is a 1990 television movie starring Anthony
   Quinn as Santiago and Francesco Quinn as the young Santiago. This
   version introduces two characters not in the novella, Tom Pruitt and
   Mary Pruitt, played by Gary Cole and Patricia Clarkson, respectively.

   In 1999, the centennial of Hemingway's birth, director Alexandr Petrov
   released an animated, large-format film of the novella, created from
   29,000 hand-painted images. The project was initiated in 1995 after
   Petrov's first meeting with Productions Pascal Blais, a Canadian
   animation company. It received the Academy Award for Best Animated
   Short Film.
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
