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Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.
During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer’s disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman’s journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.
Hemingway – himself a great sportsman – liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters – tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.
Plot
The 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 man’s 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 island’s 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.
As Santiago sails on with the fish, the marlin’s blood leaves a trail in the water and attracts sharks. The first to attack is a great mako shark, which Santiago manages to slay with the harpoon. In the struggle, the old man loses the harpoon and lengths of valuable rope, which leaves him vulnerable to other shark attacks. The old man fights off the successive vicious predators as best he can, stabbing at them with a crude spear he makes by lashing a knife to an oar, and even clubbing them with the boat’s tiller. Although he kills several sharks, more and more appear, and by the time night falls, Santiago’s continued fight against the scavengers is useless. They devour the marlin’s precious meat, leaving only skeleton, head, and tail. Santiago chastises himself for going “out too far,” and for sacrificing his great and worthy opponent. He arrives home before daybreak, stumbles back to his shack, and sleeps very deeply.
The next morning, a crowd of amazed fishermen gathers around the skeletal carcass of the fish, which is still lashed to the boat. Knowing nothing of the old man’s struggle, tourists at a nearby café observe the remains of the giant marlin and mistake it for a shark. Manolin, who has been worried sick over the old man’s absence, is moved to tears when he finds Santiago safe in his bed. The boy fetches the old man some coffee and the daily papers with the baseball scores, and watches him sleep. When the old man wakes, the two agree to fish as partners once more. The old man returns to sleep and dreams his usual dream of lions at play on the beaches of Africa.
Major theme of old man and sea
Pride
Name:
Kajal Keraliya
Topic:plot
Theme in “The old man and the sea”
Roll
no.: 18
Paper
no 10: American Literature
M.A:
Sem-3
Enrolment
no.:2069108420180030
Year:
2017-19
Submitted
to:
Smt.
S.B. Gardi Department Of English
Maharaja
Krishnakumarsinhji
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.
During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer’s disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman’s journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.
Hemingway – himself a great sportsman – liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters – tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.
Plot
The 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 man’s 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 island’s 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.
As Santiago sails on with the fish, the marlin’s blood leaves a trail in the water and attracts sharks. The first to attack is a great mako shark, which Santiago manages to slay with the harpoon. In the struggle, the old man loses the harpoon and lengths of valuable rope, which leaves him vulnerable to other shark attacks. The old man fights off the successive vicious predators as best he can, stabbing at them with a crude spear he makes by lashing a knife to an oar, and even clubbing them with the boat’s tiller. Although he kills several sharks, more and more appear, and by the time night falls, Santiago’s continued fight against the scavengers is useless. They devour the marlin’s precious meat, leaving only skeleton, head, and tail. Santiago chastises himself for going “out too far,” and for sacrificing his great and worthy opponent. He arrives home before daybreak, stumbles back to his shack, and sleeps very deeply.
The next morning, a crowd of amazed fishermen gathers around the skeletal carcass of the fish, which is still lashed to the boat. Knowing nothing of the old man’s struggle, tourists at a nearby café observe the remains of the giant marlin and mistake it for a shark. Manolin, who has been worried sick over the old man’s absence, is moved to tears when he finds Santiago safe in his bed. The boy fetches the old man some coffee and the daily papers with the baseball scores, and watches him sleep. When the old man wakes, the two agree to fish as partners once more. The old man returns to sleep and dreams his usual dream of lions at play on the beaches of Africa.
Major theme of old man and sea
Pride
Pride is often
depicted as negative attribute that causes people to reach for too much and, as
a result, suffer a terrible fall. After he kills the first shark,
Santiago, who knows he killed the marlin "for pride," wonders if the sin of
pride was responsible for the shark attack because pride caused him to go out
into the ocean beyond the usual boundaries that fishermen observe. Santiago
immediately dismisses the idea, however, and the events of The
Old Man and the Sea support his conviction that pride is not the cause
of his difficulties.
In fact,
Santiago's pride is portrayed as the single motivating force that spurs him to
greatness. It is his pride that pushes him to survive three grueling days at
sea, battling the marlin and then the sharks. Yet it is important to recognize
that Santiago's pride is of a particular, limited sort. Pride never pushes him
to try to be more than he is. For instance, when Manolin tells him, "The best fisherman is
you," early in the story, Santiago humbly disagrees. Rather, Santiago
takes pride in being exactly what he is, a man and a
fisherman, and his struggle can be seen as an effort to be the best man and
fisherman that he can be. As he thinks in the middle of his struggle with the
marlin, he must kill the marlin to show Manolin "what a man can do and
what a man endures."
Friendship
The friendship
between Santiago and Manolin plays a critical part in Santiago's
victory over the marlin. In return for
Santiago's mentorship and company, Manolin provides physical support to
Santiago in the village, bringing him food and clothing and helping him load
his skiff. He also provides emotional support, encouraging Santiago throughout
his unlucky streak. Although Santiago's "hope and confidence had never
gone," when Manolin was present, "they were freshening as when the
breeze rises." And once he encounters the marlin, Santiago refuses to
accept defeat because he knows Manolin would be disappointed in him.
Yet most of the
novella takes place when Santiago is alone. Except for Manolin's friendship in
the evenings, Santiago is characterized by his isolation. His wife has died,
and he lives and fishes alone. Even so, just as he refuses to give in to death,
he refuses to give in to loneliness. Santiago finds friends in other creatures.
The flying fish are "his principal friends on the ocean," and the
marlin, through their shared struggle, becomes his "brother." He
calls the stars his "distant friends," and thinks of the ocean as a
woman he loves. Santiago talks to himself, talks to his weakened left hand, and
imagines Manolin sitting next to him. In the end, these friendships—both real
and imagined—prevent Santiago from pitying himself. As a result, he has the
support to achieve what seems physically impossible for an old man.
Unity
Hemingway spends a good deal of time
drawing connections between Santiago and his
natural environment: the fish, birds, and stars are all his brothers or
friends, he has the heart of a turtle, eats turtle eggs for strength, drinks
shark liver oil for health, etc. Also, apparently contradictory elements are
repeatedly shown as aspects of one unified whole: the sea is both kind and
cruel, feminine and masculine; the Portuguese man of war is beautiful but
deadly; the mako shark is noble but cruel. The novella's premise of unity helps
succor Santiago in the midst of his great tragedy. For Santiago, success and
failure are two equal facets of the same existence. They are transitory forms
which capriciously arrive and depart without affecting the underlying unity
between himself and nature. As long as he focuses on this unity and sees
himself as part of nature rather than as an external antagonist competing with
it, he cannot be defeated by whatever misfortunes befall him.
Heroism
Triumph over crushing adversity is
the heart of heroism, and in order for Santiago the fisherman to be a heroic
emblem for humankind, his tribulations must be monumental. Triumph, though, is
never final, as Santiago's successful slaying of the marlin shows, else there
would be no reason to include the final 30 pages of the book. Hemingway vision
of heroism is Sisyphean, requiring continuous labor for essentially ephemeral
ends. What the hero does is to face adversity with dignity and grace, hence
Hemingway's Neo-Stoic emphasis on self-control and the other facets of his idea
of manhood. What we achieve or fail at externally is not as significant to
heroism as comporting ourselves with inner nobility. As Santiago says, "Man
is not made for defeat....A man can be destroyed but not defeated"
Manhood
Hemingway's ideal of manhood is
nearly inseparable from the ideal of heroism discussed above. To be a man is to
behave with honor and dignity: to not succumb to suffering, to accept one's
duty without complaint and, most importantly, to display a maximum of
self-control. The representation of femininity, the sea, is characterized
expressly by its caprice and lack of self-control; "if she did wild or
wicked things it was because she could not help them" (30). The
representation of masculinity, the marlin, is described as "great,"
"beautiful," "calm," and "noble," and Santiago
steels himself against his pain by telling himself to "suffer like a man.
Or a fish," referring to the marlin (92). In Hemingway's ethical universe,
Santiago shows us not only how to live life heroically but in a way befitting a
man.
Conclusion:-
There are many themes in this novella but the main
theme is heroism. We can see some heroic deeds which are done by the character
Santiago.
Work cited:
https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/oldman/themes
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