The Old Man and the Sea
The Old Man and the Sea is a 1952 novella written by the American author Ernest Hemingway. Written between December 1950 and February 1951, it was the last major fictional work Hemingway published during his lifetime. It tells the story of Santiago, an aging fisherman, and his long struggle to catch a giant marlin. The novella was highly anticipated and was released to record sales; the initial critical reception was equally positive, but attitudes have varied significantly since then.
This article is about the novella by Ernest Hemingway. For other uses, see The Old Man and the Sea (disambiguation).Author
English
September 1, 1952
United States
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1953)
- Nobel Prize in Literature (1954)
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Hemingway began writing The Old Man and the Sea in Cuba during a tumultuous period in his life. His previous novel Across the River and Into the Trees had met with negative reviews and, amid a breakdown in relations with his wife Mary, he had fallen in love with his muse Adriana Ivancich. Having completed one book of a planned "sea trilogy", Hemingway began to write as an addendum a story about an old man and a marlin that had originally been told to him fifteen years earlier. He wrote up to a thousand words a day, completing the 26,531-word manuscript in six weeks.
Over the following year, Hemingway became increasingly convinced that the manuscript would stand on its own as a novella. Life magazine published the full novella in its September 1, 1952 issue. Hemingway's publisher, Scribner's, released their first edition a week later on the 8th. Thanks to favorable early reviews and word-of-mouth, popular anticipation was so high that both releases were heavily bootlegged. The magazine sold a record 5.3 million copies in two days, while Scribner's sold tens of thousands of copies. Translated into nine languages by the end of 1952, The Old Man and the Sea remained on the New York Times bestseller list for six months. In 1953, it received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was the only work explicitly mentioned when Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
Early reviews were positive, with many hailing what they saw as a return to form for Hemingway after Across the River's negative reception. The acclaim lessened over time, as literary critics began to think the initial reception overblown and over-enthusiastic. Whether The Old Man and the Sea is inferior or equal to Hemingway's other works has since been the subject of scholarly debate. Thematic analysis has focused on Christian imagery and symbolism, on the similarity of the novella's themes to its predecessors in the Hemingway canon, and on the character of the fisherman Santiago.
Plot[edit]
Santiago is an elderly fisherman who has not caught a fish in eighty-four days and is considered salao (very unlucky). Manolin, who had been trained by Santiago, has been forced by his parents to work on a different, luckier boat; Manolin still helps Santiago prepare his gear every morning and evening and brings him food. They talk about baseball and Joe DiMaggio, before the boy leaves and Santiago sleeps. He dreams of the sights and experiences of his youth.
On the eighty-fifth day of his streak, Santiago takes his skiff out early, intending to row far into the Gulf Stream. He catches nothing except a small albacore in the morning before hooking a huge marlin. The fish is too heavy to haul in and begins to tow the skiff further out to sea. Santiago holds on through the night, eating the albacore after sunrise. He sees the marlin for the first time—it is longer than the boat. Santiago increasingly appreciates the fish, showing respect and compassion towards his adversary. Sunset arrives for a second time and the fisherman manages some sleep; he is awoken by the fish panicking but manages to recover his equilibrium. On the third morning the marlin begins to circle. Almost delirious, Santiago draws the marlin in and harpoons it. He lashes the fish to his boat.
A mako shark smells blood in the water and takes a forty-pound bite of the marlin. Killing the shark but losing his harpoon, Santiago lashes his knife to an oar as a makeshift spear and kills three more sharks before the knife blade snaps. Cursing himself for going out too far, he apologises to the mutilated carcass of the marlin. He clubs two more sharks at sunset, but the marlin is now half-eaten. In the third night, the sharks come as a pack and leave only bones behind them. Santiago reaches shore and sleeps in his shack, leaving the skeleton tied to his skiff.
In the morning, Manolin cries when he sees Santiago's state. He brings coffee and sits with Santiago until he wakes. He insists on accompanying Santiago in the future. A fisherman measures the marlin at eighteen feet long, and a pair of tourists mistake its skeleton for that of a shark. Santiago goes back to sleep and dreams of lions on an African beach.
Reception and legacy[edit]
The Old Man and the Sea met with popular acclaim. In the three weeks after publication, Hemingway received more than eighty letters a day from well-wishers, and Life received many more. Religious figures began to cite the book's themes in their sermons.[17] Critical reception was initially equally positive, placing the novella as superior in quality to Across the River and equal to Hemingway's earliest works. With Time magazine labelling it a "masterpiece", Cyril Connolly praised "the best story Hemingway has ever written" and Mark Schorer noted that Hemingway's "incomparable" work set him apart as "the greatest craftsman in the American novel in this century".[18] Many reviewers, seeing it as "the apex of the Hemingway canon", termed it a "classic".[19] Hemingway's favourite review was from the art historian Bernard Berenson, who wrote that The Old Man and the Sea was superior to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and equal in many ways to the Homeric epics.[20]
After the early adulation faded, less positive reviews began to appear. Delmore Schwartz believed that the initial reviewers had prejudiced public opinion in their relief that the novella was not as bad as Across the River. Seymour Krim wrote that The Old Man and the Sea was "only more of the same", while John W. Aldridge felt himself "unable to share in the prevailing wild enthusiasm" for the novella.[21] Years later, Jeffrey Meyers called it Hemingway's "most overrated work", a "mock-serious fable" with "radical weaknesses".[22] Despite the cooling critical outlook, The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction on May 4, 1953—this was the first time Hemingway had received the award, having been overlooked previously for A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls.[23] He also accepted a Medal of Honor from Fulgencio Batista's newly-established Cuban dictatorship, despite personally disapproving of the new regime.[24] The Old Man and the Sea's highest recognition came on October 28, 1954, as the only work of Hemingway's mentioned by the Swedish Academy when awarding him the Nobel Prize in Literature; they praised its "powerful, style-making mastery of the art of modern narration".[25]
The Old Man and the Sea has been the subject of a significant amount of critical commentary. Wirt Williams noted that early scholarship focused upon "the naturalistic tragedy, the Christian tragedy, the parable of art and the artist, and even the autobiographical mode".[26] Analysis of these themes continued into the 1960s, during which John Killinger connected the novella with Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Friedrich Nietzsche, and Richard Hovey linked its themes to the Oedipus complex. However, Philip Young's republication of Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration in 1966 was much less positive than the original edition in 1952, setting the disinterested scholarly tone that would dominate the next decades. Analysis only restarted in earnest with the publication of Gerry Brenner's hyper-critical The Old Man and the Sea: The Story of a Common Man in 1991, and has continued unabated since.[27]
Writing in 1985, Meyers noted that The Old Man and the Sea was used in English lessons in schools worldwide and continued to earn $100,000 per year in royalties.[28] According to the CIA, it was a favourite book of Saddam Hussein, who saw himself, like Santiago, as "struggl[ing] against overwhelming odds with courage, perseverance, and dignity".[29] The Big Read, a 2003 survey of the United Kingdom's 200 "best-loved novels" conducted by the BBC, listed The Old Man and the Sea at number 173.[30] Hemingway was directly involved in making a 1958 film adaptation starring Spencer Tracy. Production was marred by numerous difficulties and although the film soundtrack, composed by Dimitri Tiomkin, won the Academy Award for Best Original Score, Hemingway heartily disliked the final film.[31] Two more adaptations have been produced: a 1990 television film starring Anthony Quinn,[32] and a 1999 production by Aleksandr Petrov which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.[33]
Critical analysis[edit]
Quality[edit]
Some literary critics find The Old Man and the Sea inferior to Hemingway's earlier works. Dwight Macdonald criticises the pseudo-archaic prose which pretends it is high culture, but in reality is anything but.[34] He compares the novella unfavourably with Hemingway's earlier works; he deplored The Old Man and the Sea as garrulous and repetitive when compared to the "disciplined, businesslike understatement" of The Undefeated, a short story Hemingway wrote in 1927.[35] Similarly, Brenner characterises the novella as riddled with amateurish mistakes in style and prose.[36] Meyers criticises The Old Man and the Sea's melodrama, symbolism, and irony, concluding, like Macdonald, that "Hemingway either deceived himself about the profundity of his art" or expertly satisfied the desires of a pretentious audience.[37]
Robert Weeks notes that the novella abounds in factual impossibilities—he cites Santiago's near-clairvoyance in identifying fishes and judging weather patterns. Weeks maintains that Hemingway—previously criticized for his distaste for narrative invention—had instilled insincerity at the heart of his novel. He concluded that The Old Man and the Sea is "an inferior Hemingway novel."[38] Bickford Sylvester comments that most of the errors Weeks outlined were based upon faults in then-current science, and some others were intended to nudge readers towards the work's subtext and deepest details.[39] Sylvester argues that seemingly-implausible narrative details in The Old Man and the Sea are actually hints. He cites the baseball conversation between Santiago and Manolin, which subtly indicates not only the precise dates of the novella's events (September 12–16, 1950) but also parallels the fisherman with his hero DiMaggio, also the son of a fisherman, who similarly resurged in performance during that week.[40]