Major Themes in The Old Man and the Sea

Seventh Lecture
Major Themes in The Old Man and the Sea
1-Man’s Oneness with Nature
Between Santiago and the sea, there exists an inviolable bond .He loves the sea .Hemingway explains this aspect of the old mans character thus :”He always thought of the sea La mar which is what people call her is Spanish when they loved her. The old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours , and if she did wicked things it was because she could not help them. The feeling love and respect that Santiago feels for the seais extended even towards the fish ,his adversary.” Fish , I love you and respect you very much “,he utters repeatedly. At one stage he says loudly ,”The fish is my friend too. I have never seen or heard of such a fish .But I must kill him . I am glad we don’t have to try to kill the stars”.The essential bond between the man and the fish is stressed like this : “Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him .How many people will be fed, he thought .But are they worth of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity” . Later the old man addressed the fish as a brother….etc.

2- Pride as the Source of Greatness and Determination
Many parallels exist between Santiago and the classic heroes of the ancient world. In addition to exhibiting terrific strength, bravery, and moral certainty, those heroes usually possess a tragic flaw—a quality that, though admirable, leads to their eventual downfall. If pride is Santiago’s fatal flaw, he is keenly aware of it. After sharks have destroyed the marlin, the old man apologizes again and again to his worthy opponent. He has ruined them both, he concedes, by sailing beyond the usual boundaries of fishermen. Indeed, his last word on the subject comes when he asks himself the reason for his undoing and decides, “Nothing . . . I went out too far.” While it is certainly true that Santiago’s eighty-four-day run of bad luck is an affront to his pride as a masterful fisherman, and that his attempt to bear out his skills by sailing far into the gulf waters leads to disaster, Hemingway does not condemn his protagonist for being full of pride. On the contrary, Santiago stands as proof that pride motivates men to greatness. Because the old man acknowledges that he killed the mighty marlin largely out of pride, and because his capture of the marlin leads in turn to his heroic transcendence of defeat, pride becomes the source of Santiago’s greatest strength. Without a ferocious sense of pride, that battle would never have been fought, or more likely, it would have been abandoned before the end….etc

3- Resistance to Defeat
As a fisherman who has caught nothing for the last 84 days, Santiago is a man fighting against defeat. Yet Santiago never gives in to defeat: he sails further into the ocean than he ever has before in hopes of landing a fish, struggles with the marlin for three days and nights despite immense physical pain and exhaustion, and, after catching the marlin, fights off the sharks even when it s clear that the battle against them is hopeless. Whenever the situation gets particularly difficult and despair threatens to overwhelm Santiago, he turns to a number of tactics to fuel his resistance to defeat: he recalls memories of his youthful strength; he relies on his pride by demanding that he prove himself a worthy role model for Manolin or by comparing himself to his hero Joe DiMaggio; and he prays to God, even though his prayers do nothing to ease his physical suffering.