THEMES
THE HONOR IN
STRUGGLE, DEFEAT & DEATH
Because Santiago is pitted against the creatures of the sea,
some readers choose to view the tale as a chronicle of man’s battle against the
natural world, but the novella is, more accurately, the story of man’s place
within nature. Both Santiago and the marlin display qualities of pride, honour,
and bravery, and both are subject to the same eternal law: they must kill or be
killed. As Santiago reflects when he watches the weary warbler fly toward
shore, where it will inevitably meet the hawk, the world is filled with
predators, and no living thing can escape the inevitable struggle that will
lead to its death. Santiago lives according to his own observation: “man is not
made for defeat . . . [a] man can be destroyed but not defeated.” In
Hemingway’s portrait of the world, death is inevitable, but the best men (and
animals) will nonetheless refuse to give in to its power. Accordingly, man and
fish will struggle to the death, just as hungry sharks will lay waste to an old
man’s trophy catch.
The novel suggests that it is possible to transcend this
natural law. In fact, the very inevitability of destruction creates the terms
that allow a worthy man or beast to transcend it. It is precisely through the
effort to battle the inevitable that a man can prove himself. Indeed, a man can
prove this determination over and over through the worthiness of the opponents
he chooses to face. Santiago finds the marlin worthy of a fight, just as he
once found “the great negro of Cienfuegos” worthy. His admiration for these
opponents brings love and respect into an equation with death, as their
destruction becomes a point of honour and bravery that confirms Santiago’s
heroic qualities. One might characterize the equation as the working out of the
statement, “Because I love you, I have to kill you.” Alternately, one might draw
a parallel to the poet John Keats and his insistence that beauty can only be
comprehended in the moment before death, as beauty bows to destruction.
Santiago, though destroyed at the end of the novella, is never defeated.
Instead, he emerges as a hero. Santiago’s struggle does not enable him to
change man’s place in the world. Rather, it enables him to meet his most
dignified destiny.
PRIDE AS THE SOURCE OF GREATNESS & 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 the 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.
Santiago’s pride also motivates his desire to transcend the
destructive forces of nature. Throughout the novel, no matter how baleful his
circumstances become, the old man exhibits an unflagging determination to catch
the marlin and bring it to shore. When the first shark arrives, Santiago’s
resolve is mentioned twice in the space of just a few paragraphs. First we are told
that the old man “was full of resolution but he had little hope.” Then,
sentences later, the narrator says, “He hit [the shark] without hope but with
resolution.” The old man meets every challenge with the same unwavering
determination: he is willing to die in order to bring in the marlin, and he is
willing to die in order to battle the feeding sharks. It is this conscious
decision to act, to fight, to never give up that enables Santiago to avoid
defeat. Although he returns to Havana without the trophy of his long battle, he
returns with the knowledge that he has acquitted himself proudly and manfully. Hemingway seems to suggest that victory is not a prerequisite for the honour. Instead, glory depends upon one having the pride to see a struggle through to
its end, regardless of the outcome. Even if the old man had returned with the
marlin intact, his moment of glory, like the marlin’s meat, would have been
short-lived. The glory and honour Santiago accrues come not from his battle itself but from his pride and determination to fight.
- The Old Man and the Sea by Earnest Hemingway: Critical Analysis and Summary
- Plot Overview
- Themes
- Character sketch of Santiago
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