SparkNotes - The Old Man and the Sea: SparkNotes Literature Guide

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E rnest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899 , the son of a doctor and a music teacher. He began his writing career as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. At age eighteen, he volunteered to serve as a Red Cross ambulance driver in World War I and was sent to Italy, where he was badly injured by shrapnel. Hemingway later fictionalized his experience in Italy in what some consider his greatest novel, A Farewell to Arms. In 1921 , Hemingway moved to Paris, where he served as a correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star. In Paris, he fell in with a group of American and English expatriate writers that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Ford Madox Ford. In the early 1920 s, Hemingway began to achieve fame as a chronicler of the disaffection felt by many American youth after World War Ia generation of youth whom Stein memorably dubbed the Lost Generation. His novels The Sun Also Rises ( 1926 ) and A Farewell to Arms ( 1929 ) established him as a dominant literary voice of his time. His spare, charged style of writing was revolutionary at the time and would be imitated, for better or for worse, by generations of young writers to come.

After leaving Paris, Hemingway wrote on bullfighting, published short stories and articles, covered the Spanish Civil War as a journalist, and published his best-selling novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls ( 1940 ). These pieces helped Hemingway build up the mythic breed of masculinity for which he wished to be known. His work and his life revolved around big-game hunting, fishing, boxing, and bullfighting, endeavors that he tried to master as seriously as he did writing. In the 1930 s, Hemingway lived in Key West, Florida, and later in Cuba, and his years of experience fishing the Gulf Stream and the Caribbean provided an essential background for the vivid descriptions of the fishermans craft in The Old Man and the Sea. In 1936, he wrote a piece for Esquire about a Cuban fisherman who was dragged out to sea by a great marlin, a game fish that typically weighs hundreds of pounds. Sharks had destroyed the fishermans catch by the time he was found half-delirious by other fishermen. This story seems an obvious seed for the tale of Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea.

A great fan of baseball, Hemingway liked to talk in the sports lingo, and by 1952 , he badly needed a win. His novel Across the River and Into the Trees, published in 1950 , was a disaster. It was his first novel in ten years, and he had claimed to friends that it was his best yet. Critics, however, disagreed and called the work the worst thing Hemingway had ever written. Many readers claimed it read like a parody of Hemingway. The control and precision of his earlier prose seemed to be lost beyond recovery.

The huge success of The Old Man and the Sea, published in 1952 , was a much-needed vindication. The novella won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it likely cinched the Nobel Prize for Hemingway in 1954 , as it was cited for particular recognition by the Nobel Academy. It was the last novel published in his lifetime.

Although the novella helped to regenerate Hemingways wilting career, it has since been met by divided critical opinion. While some critics have praised The Old Man and the Sea as a new classic that takes its place among such established American works as William Faulkners short story The Bear and Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick, others have attacked the story as imitation Hemingway and find fault with the authors departure from the uncompromising realism with which he made his name.

Because Hemingway was a writer who always relied heavily on autobiographical sources, some critics, not surprisingly, eventually decided that the novella served as a thinly veiled attack upon them. According to this reading, Hemingway was the old master at the end of his career being torn apart bybut ultimately triumphing overcritics on a feeding frenzy. But this reading ultimately reduces The Old Man and the Sea to little more than an act of literary revenge. The more compelling interpretation asserts that the novella is a parable about life itself, in particular mans struggle for triumph in a world that seems designed to destroy him.

Despite the soberly life-affirming tone of the novella, Hemingway was, at the end of his life, more and more prone to debilitating bouts of depression. He committed suicide in 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho.

T he Old Man and the Sea is the story of an epic struggle between an old, seasoned fisherman and the greatest catch of his life. For eighty-four days, Santiago, an aged Cuban fisherman, has set out to sea and returned empty-handed. So conspicuously unlucky is he that the parents of his young, devoted apprentice and friend, Manolin, have forced the boy to leave the old man in order to fish in a more prosperous boat. Nevertheless, the boy continues to care for the old man upon his return each night. He helps the old man tote his gear to his ramshackle hut, secures food for him, and discusses the latest developments in American baseball, especially the trials of the old mans hero, Joe DiMaggio. Santiago is confident that his unproductive streak will soon come to an end, and he resolves to sail out farther than usual the following day.

On the eighty-fifth day of his unlucky streak, Santiago does as promised, sailing his skiff far beyond the islands shallow coastal waters and venturing into the Gulf Stream. He prepares his lines and drops them. At noon, a big fish, which he knows is a marlin, takes the bait that Santiago has placed one hundred fathoms deep in the waters. The old man expertly hooks the fish, but he cannot pull it in. Instead, the fish begins to pull the boat.

Unable to tie the line fast to the boat for fear the fish would snap a taut line, the old man bears the strain of the line with his shoulders, back, and hands, ready to give slack should the marlin make a run. The fish pulls the boat all through the day, through the night, through another day, and through another night. It swims steadily northwest until at last it tires and swims east with the current. The entire time, Santiago endures constant pain from the fishing line. Whenever the fish lunges, leaps, or makes a dash for freedom, the cord cuts Santiago badly. Although wounded and weary, the old man feels a deep empathy and admiration for the marlin, his brother in suffering, strength, and resolve.

On the third day the fish tires, and Santiago, sleep-deprived, aching, and nearly delirious, manages to pull the marlin in close enough to kill it with a harpoon thrust. Dead beside the skiff, the marlin is the largest Santiago has ever seen. He lashes it to his boat, raises the small mast, and sets sail for home. While Santiago is excited by the price that the marlin will bring at market, he is more concerned that the people who will eat the fish are unworthy of its greatness.