Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea –Excelling Hardships of Time and Circumstances.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), is one of the most debated and discussed personalities of 20th-century American writers. He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21st,1899. His father was a doctor and although his family owned a cottage on a lake, he liked to spend much of his time rowing out across the water and sleeping out in the tent, and reading. He graduated from Oak Park High School in 1917 and then started working as a reporter in a newspaper. 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.
Hemingway’s 62 years of life were packed with excitement and anticipation. Living through adventure after adventure, he wrote stories of his life and love on the Left Bank of Parise, of death and bull-fights as he saw in Spain, and also the fierce beasts he haunted in the African jungle, the two world wars in which he played a part in Europe, and a giant fish he battled off the coast of Cuba. But then his writings were more than just adventure stories. He is a pioneer of modern novels, as he enabled to set the style for the modern novel. His lean, muscular prose and dramatic plots, have perhaps, been copied more than any other modern author’s and his work has been translated into all the world’s major languages. He was perhaps the most influential and dominant writer of his generation and other writers attempted to adapt his tough, understated prose to their works, usually without success. As Clinton S. Burhans, Jr., noted: "The famous and extraordinarily eloquent concreteness of Hemingway's style is inimitable precisely because it is not primarily stylistic: the how of Hemingway's style is the what of his characteristic vision."
As such, influenced by Ezra Pound and particularly by Gertrude Stein, Hemingway published Three Stories and Ten Poems in 1923 and In Our Time in 1925. He carried out the style and attitude of his short-stories into his first great novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1927), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952).
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). In this novel, Hemingway invites the readers to enter the hedonistic lives of the post first World War European elite, a world of parties, sex, and drama. 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. The novel narrates the first-person account of an American lieutenant in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army, during the first World War. Here the author provides us with insight into the pains caused by a war-ravaged world and challenges perceptions of war.
Whereas, Hemingway used his experiences and understanding of a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most striving novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). This great novel is a war-story about an American named Robert Jordan and is based on Hemingway’s real-life pieces of knowledge and experiences of the Spanish Civil War, where he was a journalist and war reporter. The novel explores themes of honor, death, duty, love, nature, amity, innocence, war, modernity, salvation, the value of human life, and man’s motivation.
Well 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 elongated and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat. As such, The Old Man and the Sea was his last novel and it depicts the story of Santiago, an old and skilled fisherman. The novel is known for its multi-layered and multi-textural meanings, themes, and motifs, as it explores pride, honor, grandeur, life, death, redemption, martyrdom, and struggle. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and contributed to Hemingway’s Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
The Old Man and the Sea is also a parable of man and nature, narrating the story of a Cuban fisherman named Santiago. The story theatrically tells us that after 84 luckless days, rowing his skiff into the Gulf Stream in quest of Marlin, Santiago is ultimately successful in catching a fish. The portrait of an aged and solitary man, who goes far out and hooks a big fish, is quite dramatic and thrilling. But then again we see that as days pass the situation gets very tiring and we see the old man towing his boat all afternoon and night and into the next day. Remembering his youth, he pits his skill and waning strength in the way he once did against a wrestler called El Campeon. And as the second night turns into dawn, he finally harpoons his catch, lashes it to his small boat, and makes his weary way home. Unluckily, as he sails slowly to the port, sharks attack his catch, he fights them as best as he can with a knife lashed to the tiller gripped in raw hands. But unfortunately, as he reached the land, his Marlin is but a skeleton.
You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more? (The Old Man and the Sea)
Proud in defeat, Santiago staggers to his hut, to be found by the boy and other fishermen who marvel at his catch, while the exhausted man sleeps and dreams.
The theme which has been expressed in the apparently simple, yet actually intricately designed plot of Santiago’s adventure with the marlin and sharks, is man’s capacity to withstand and transcend hardships of time and circumstances. Hemingway illustrates before us the difficulties and hardships to which Santiago is subject and how with courage and imagination, he counters the forces testing him. When the marlin takes outline, he pulls in; when he is surrounded by the darkness of night, he dreams of golden and white beaches; when he is threatened by the vision of his own old age, he summons visions of his own youthful strength. Consequently, in this way Hemingway presents the action, not in abstract terms – gain and loss, strength and weakness, youth and age – but in vivid images – marlin and sharks, right hand and left, Monalio and Santiago.
The novel certainly is a beautifully executed parable. Every action and every motif can be interpreted allegorically and the literary and symbolic meaning operate continuously and consistently. The novel is a double allegory, one of the natures of man’s struggle with life and the other, of the artists with the art. By a strange paradox, Hemingway has never written more universally or meaningfully of himself than in this most externalized of all his stories; like Santiago determining to justify his reputation as a skilled fisherman –
The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it. (The Old Man and the Sea)
As such, Santiago’s voyage can be compared to the Ulysses episode in the Inferno. In Dante the voyage of Ulysses, who burns with desire ends in a shipwreck, is interpreted as symbolizing the disaster of thirst for scientific knowledge that is unrestrained by humans and religious feelings. Likewise, Santiago also sails out beyond his limits and his voyage too ends in material disaster. He says –
Half-fish…. fish that you were I am sorry that I went too far out, I ruined us both. (Old Man and the Sea )
But Hemingway, whose exploration of the vices and the valor of humanity is guided by compassion and respect shapes his parable towards a different end –
But man is not made for defeat…A man can be destroyed but not defeated…its silly not to hope, he thought. Besides I believe it is a sin. (Old Man and the Sea)
This kind of hope and faith is evidently very different from Hemingway’s other characters – namely from Nick Adam’s return to illusion and Frederick Henry’s surrender to disillusion. Santiago suffers neither from illusion nor disillusion, he lives as he says. This passage from illusion through various phases of disillusion to the conclusion of sober hope represents Hemingway’s profound spiritual and emotional progress during the thirty years of his career as a writer.
One of the most remarkable and talked about features of Hemingway’s novels is what has come out to be known as The Hemingway Hero. The protagonist of his works so resembles one another that many critics often refer to them in the singular as The Hemingway Hero. This Hemingway Hero appears under different names and pretexts in various books. The first among them is Nick Adams and the last is Santiago, who is in fact the finest and the best. He is best for the reason that he behaves perfectly – even while losing he does not lose his courage. Destruction and loss cannot remodify him. He is always human, always graceful, always full of sympathy and unconditional love for humanity and nature. It is Santiago who brings us the message that, while the man may grow old and be down on his luck, yet he can still dare to persist and win a victory by the very manner of his loss.
The greatness of life lies not in the victory but the struggle. Life is beautiful but not always easy, it has problems, too, and the challenge lies in facing them with courage. Subsequently, Santiago is pitted against the creatures of the sea, some feel that the novel is a chronicle of humanity’s battle against the natural world, but the story is, more truly, the story of humanity’s place within nature. As Santiago’s exhausting and near-endless battle with the Marlin shows, his is a world in which life and death go hand in hand. Everything in the world must die, and according to Santiago, only a brotherhood between humans and creatures can ease the ominousness of that fact. The death of the Marlin serves as a beautiful case in point, for as the fish dies it is not only transformed into something larger than itself, it is also charged with life. Then the fish came alive, with his death in him. In Hemingway’s conception of the natural world, beauty is deadly, age is strength, and death is the greatest occurrence of vitality.
Both Santiago and the Marlin display qualities of pride, honor, and bravery, and both are subject to the same eternal law- they must kill or be killed. Finding hope amid uncertainty, conflict, or loss is the main lesson that the novel teaches. Hope can nurture determination and perseverance. It can accelerate the ability to bounce back and to remain determined despite failures and setbacks -
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
(by Emily Dickinson)
(Source: The Poems of Emily Dickinson Edited by R. W. Franklin
Harvard University Press, 1999)
As such in Hemingway’s portrait of the world, death is inevitable, but the best person will however 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. Death is the unavoidable force in the novel, the one fact that no living creature can escape. But death, Hemingway suggests, is never an end in itself, in death, there is always the possibility of the most vital life. Thus, as Santiago slays the Marlin, not only is the old man revived by the battle, but the fish also comes alive “with his death in him.” Life, the possibility of renewal, necessarily follows on the heels of death.
The novel advocates that it is possible to transcend this natural law. In fact, the very predictability of destruction creates the terms that allow a worthy human or beast to transcend it. Santiago’s pride motivates his desire to transcend the destructive forces of nature. Throughout the novel, no matter how threatening his circumstances become, the old man exhibits a persistent determination to catch the Marlin and bring it to shore. It is precisely through the effort to battle the inevitable that humans can prove themselves. Santiago, though devastated at the end of the novel, is never defeated. Instead, he emerges as a hero, his struggle does not enable him to change humankind’s place in the world. Relatively, it enables him to meet his most dignified destiny.
Unlike, For Whom the Bell Tolls here in this novel there is no glamor of war, love, and death. Yet Santiago is like Robert Jordan who believes in his works, in his discipline, not just for the duration of the war but for his life. He performs what he is born for, unexpected at the risk of his life, all alone, far away from the applauding audience. Santiago demonstrates the necessity and the reality of heroism in everyday life. Hemingway deliberately removes all trappings from Santiago’s worlds, and at the same time subjects him to extremes where he must rely on nothing but his own resourcefulness. Here he is made to fight the biggest fish he has ever encountered and he fights for hours, breaking his tiller, losing his oar, knife, and even the rope and harpoon. On top of this, he is an old man, lacking the youthful vitality of life. Never before has Hemingway gone thus far in baring the stage of his hero’s action to be seen in such allegorical simplicity.
But against all the odds Santiago survives. He tells himself –
Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready. (The Old Man and the Sea)
Exactness is preferred to luck. He also convinces himself that there is always hope as long as he can keep his head clear. He may not have the youthful muscle, but he has the wisdom and the skill required to be a good fisherman. He has a sense of duty to his vocation and that is the reason the idea of quitting never occurs to him. These qualities – humility, pride, piety, courage, endurance, persistence, and faith make his character unforgettable.
The character of Santiago is noteworthy also because it stresses what a man can do and in the world as an arena where heroic deeds are possible. It is thus a parable on a public and figurative level, about life, which is the finest and most ambitious things for a parable to be about. Undoubtedly Hemingway has written about life - a struggle against the impossible odds of unconquerable natural forces in which, given such a fact as that of death, a man can only lose, but which he can dominate in such a way that his loss has dignity, itself makes it a victory.
Santiago is also not like Captain Ahab in Melville’s novel Moby Dick, who directly seeks out knowledge about the universe or tries to conquer nature. He is not the dammed Romantic hero, but simply a man struggling to live. In this struggle, he learns to understand and respect his adversaries as well. He loves and understands the marlin. The story of the novel does not at any time in its narration suggest that man is alone in a hostile universe, but rather it points out the fact that man belongs to and is within a natural process. Man’s life is not meaningless, but plays in a larger system of meaning, even though we may or may not understand that system through our normal logical ways of thought, or even by the ways of conventional religion. The story seems to confirm that certain human responses, like pity, anger, determination, practical application, and self-questioning, are not delusive but real, and that they are sustained, rather than destabilized by nature. Luck and endurance seem to be equally important. Someone has justly said that the magic of success is powered by persistence.
In the novel, when a bird unexpectedly lands to rest on the rope that is stretched taut between the old man and the doomed fish, Santiago says – take a good rest, small bird…then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish. The man or bird or fish who takes his chance in life will have to go his way alone. But the rope of agony that connects Santiago and the marlin suggests a strange but vital companionship. Accordingly, The Old Man and the Sea interweaves these two concepts of life; its essential loneliness and its unbreakable togetherness.
Santiago throughout his ordeal is supported by the thought of others. In his relations with the birds and fishes, he democrats that ‘No man is ever alone in the sea’. While during his ordeal, the two phases ‘I wish the boy was here’ and ‘I wish I had the boy’ plays many times across Santiago’s mind. Literary he means it, but he is also invoking by this means of these phrases the strength and courage of his youth. The effect of the invocation is always magical as if employing it, some of the strength of youth has flown into sustaining the limited powers of the age. Even during the night, he sees lions on the beaches of Africa. There is a symbolic connection between the boy and the lions –
He only dreamed of places now and of the lions on the beach. they played like younger cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. (The Old Man and the Sea)
In his old age and the time of his suffering, he is supported by the memory of his youth. Living so, in the past, he is happy. This planned continuity of the old man with the double image of the boy and the lions convert the story of Santiago, in one of its meanings, into a parable of youth and age.
In the course of the story, repeatedly addresses the fish as a brother. yet at the same time, he is persistently determined to capture and kill it. He exclaims – ‘I did not know he was so big …I will kill him though …in all his greatness and his glory.’ All the qualities that he sees in the great fish – beauty, nobility, courage, calmness, and endurance- are the qualities that he values the most. Paradoxically the only means he has of conforming to them in himself is by exercising them in opposition to the fish. He must symbolically slay the lord of life in order to achieve a spiritual identity with him.
The Old Man and the Sea mean more than it directly says. Here the mystique of fishing, with its limited triumphs and tragedies, is transported into a universal condition of life, with its success and disgrace, its morality and pride, and potential loss of pride. The story of Santiago stands as a natural parable also. In the story as in life, the battle commences, grows, and subsides between one sleep to another. The story is a parable on the theme of fighting the good fight, and a metaphor for life, a contest in which the greater thing is the struggle and in which even the problem of right and wrong occupies a secondary place. Human life is represented as a struggle against the unconquered forces of the world. Hemingway here shows a reverence of life’s struggle, as he portraits a simple man who is capable of extraordinary dignity and heroism.
Well, Santiago is Hemingway’s code hero who demonstrates the value of life that the author cherished and glorified all his life – courage, hope, dignity, honor, conscientiousness, dedication, and endurance. A person may grow old and be wholly down on his luck, but he still dares and persist. It is this consciousness of heroism that enables a person to face life. Santiago has thus rightly been called the ‘apotheosis’ of the code hero. His character remarkable demonstrates what humans can do. At the end of the story, he is confident and ready for more action and more struggle.
Hemingway’s literary style is today universally recognized as one of the important innovations of 20th-century literature. The prose is aggressively colloquial and non-literary in its rhymes and textures. Typically, the sentences are short and declarative. The style is simple, even to the point of monotony. His distinction as a novelist rests upon his brilliant fiction techniques, his short and consisting dialogues, concrete statements, and his concentration of action. This novel no doubt has unanimously been regarded as a triumph of the author, his best work. It is no doubt a novel of affirmation and inspiration.
The novel to the very details of its language – as in its physical settings and symbolical meanings – emphasizes that we are collective as well as unaided in an ambiguous world. We all have our parts to play. Santiago plans his next expedition with better weapons and new tricks and skills. His withdrawal into sleep and dream of lions, in the last scene, is not a movement into dearth, nor an acceptance of the finality of isolation. But it is a moment’s submersion in the deeper spring of the self so that individuality and strength can be reborn; that the past can contribute to being brought to life in the present. The novel gives the message of what in Bhagwat Gita Lord Krishnan tells this to Arjun -
कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन । मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भुर्मा ते संगोऽस्त्वकर्मणि I
(Karmanye Vadhikaraste, Ma phaleshou kada chana, Ma Karma Phala Hetur Bhurmatey Sangostva Akarmani)
You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty. (Bhagavad Gita, Chapter II, Verse 47)
Arjuna's Dharma as a warrior was to fight the battle. His Dharma as a human was to work for the betterment of society. Together, his Dharma was to fight the evil forces and help virtuous forces win. Nonetheless, to evade the negative effects of killing others and performing bad karma, Krishna told him to disassociate himself of the karma - by fighting selflessly without expecting victory or loss, fame or disgrace or otherwise. He was told to kill evil forces because it was his dharma, but without having any intention of benefits or loss, i.e. Nishkam karma. That is to say to do an action but without the illusion that the outcome is going to fulfill oneself or destroy oneself. That is to say to do the duty without concentrating on the result, so the outcome whatever it may be does not change into reaction. For this to happen, it is vital to realize oneself as beyond the body, mind, intellect, and ego. One must realize himself as a form of purity. Once that has happened then the realization comes, that no fruit of any good action can be fulfilled, and at the same time no fruit of any bad action can truly harmful. Once this happens, then one is complete in this moment. Free from greed and also from fear. One has realized that there is nothing to be gained and nothing to be lost. And then, Nishkam karma arises. Once one has realized himself as an Immortal soul and realizes that everyone else is also the same. Then one experiences that everyone is One. Once grounded in this realization, bad actions cannot arise. Even the act of killing is no more done to get revenge or hurt the other, but it is done from a deeper understanding, which is to free one from sin and also to free society from sin.
Santiago is no doubt a karma yogi, doing Nishkam karma, but simultaneously he is doing his Dharam. Nishkam Karma basically means self-less or desire-less action performed without any expectation of fruits or results. As a fisherman it is his duty to go out in the sea and catch fish, he has compassion and love for the fish and the result does not halt or depressed him. He rests and is ready for another day of work.
Accordingly, the protagonist in the novel thus transcending hardships of time and circumstances and the novel ends like the greatest fables in certain memorable images; the skeleton of a great fish, waiting to return to the sea, the inadequacy of words to express the truth, as when the waiter’s ambiguous words mislead the tourist; and the image of the old age joined by youth, and preparing for a fresh start. Another story is about to be written, and we are its plot. Nonetheless, Ernest Hemingway, the greatest writer of his century, a man who had a zest for life and adventure as big as his genius, could not himself get inspiration from his writings, ended his life at the age of 62.
Bibliography
· Hemingway, Ernest The Old Man and the Sea, SCRIBNER Simon & Schuster, New York. (2003)
References –
· https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1954/hemingway/biographical/
· https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ernest-Hemingway#ref172598
· https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/being-ernest-john-walsh-unravels-the-mystery-behind-hemingways-suicide-2294619.html
Chapter from my book “Critiquing Seven Contemporary Writers Books For A Lifetime”2021 Vedant International Publications ISBN-978-81-952601-7-1
https://myvedant.com/product/critiquing-seven-contemporary-writers-books-for- a-lifetime/
No comments:
Post a Comment