[In the following essay, Wilson asserts that the time spans mentioned in The Old Man and the Sea refer to the sacred Christian mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption, which reinforce the mythic dimension of the story.]

That the heroic fisherman of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea carries a heavy burden of Christ symbolism has been widely recognized, but critics have disagreed markedly about the extent to which this identification functions in the novella and about how this symbolism is finally to be interpreted. In addition to the well annotated references to the crucifixion itself and to the other events of Passion Week, the author has, however, provided some helpful clues quite early in the book—clues that previous commentators seem to have overlooked and that may contribute to some clarification of this critical problem.

As the novella opens, we are told that Santiago "had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish," and, in the second sentence, we learn that during "the first forty days a boy had been with him."¹ If we add to this eighty-four day period the three days covered by the book's action, we get a total of eighty-seven days. Shortly thereafter, the boy recalls, "'But remember how you went eighty-seven days without fish and then we caught big ones every day for three weeks'" (p. 10). In this way, Hemingway establishes two separate time spans of eighty-seven days that are important in the old man's life. The "forty days" and the three days covered by the novella's action are clear references to the Fasting in the Wilderness (and thus to Lent) and to Christ's Passion, respectively, and have been so noted by nearly every critic to address himself to this aspect of the work, but, since this author's choice of details is rarely capricious, one wonders immediately about the possible significance of the two eighty-seven-day spans.

If one pursues the hint of the reference to forty days and looks carefully at the Christian liturgical calendar, it appears that Hemingway may have had something quite definite in mind when he selected this number. Two particular periods in the church year suggest the figure. The first is the entire Christmas Cycle from the first day of Advent, 27 November, to the last day on which Septuagesima Sunday can fall, 22 February; the second is from Ash Wednesday to Ascension Thursday, a period that constitutes all but the last ten days of the Easter Cycle from Lent through Paschaltide. While these correspondences may, of course, be merely coincidental, it seems unlikely; we know that Hemingway was familiar with the liturgical calendar, and the basic fact that he chose to make such heavy use of Christian symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea argues against coincidence. At any rate, the implications of these correspondences might well be worth exploring.

The first of these two time spans in the old man's life, the eighty-seven days followed by the three fruitful weeks, suggests the liturgical Mystery of the Incarnation. During this period, in terms of Christian myth, the liturgy commemorates Christ's assumption of his earthly life and the establishment of his claim as the Son of God. Similarly, it is during this time span in Hemingway's parable that Santiago establishes his claim to heroic stature in the eyes of the boy Manolo and becomes, in fact, the hero incarnate. We can see, for example, in the dialogue concerning doubt and faith that immediately follows the mention of this time span (pp. 10-11) the existence of a master-disciple relationship between the old man and the boy, as Carlos Baker, among others, has pointed out.² In citing specifically three weeks during which the old man and the boy "caught big ones every day" (p. 10), Hemingway may well be alluding to the three years of Christ's public ministry during which he was both a fisher of men himself and an instructor to his disciples in how to be fishers of men, a role paralleled by Santiago in his instruction of Manolo. Furthermore, the way in which Christ established his divinity among the faithful was by performing miracles, and, similarly, Manolo's faith in Santiago seems clearly to be founded on the apparent miracle of three weeks' bounty after the long barren period.³ A later reference, also tied to a discussion of faith that immediately precedes it, identifies this eighty-seven-day span as a "great record" (p. 19) in the eyes of the boy, just as Christ's life on earth, as attested in the Gospels, constitutes a great record in a different sense of the word. And when, to the boy's comment, the old man responds, "'It could not happen twice'" (p. 19), he underlines the unique nature of his incarnation as hero.⁴ Finally, the importance of all this is to be found in the theological concept that only through the Incarnation of Christ, through his assumption of human form, can his eventual sacrifice have redemptive value for mankind; were he only divine, the Passion could have no human meaning because it would involve no sacrifice. Similarly, Hemingway seems clearly to be establishing Santiago's "great record," which concluded with three triumphal weeks' bounty, to render more meaningful the second eighty-seven-day span, which is to end with three days of agony and apparent defeat.

If the first time span suggests the Mystery of the Incarnation, then the second span, that including the eighty-four days that the old fisherman has gone without taking a fish plus the three days described in the novella, would seem correspondingly to suggest the Mystery of the Redemption. The many symbolic details linking Santiago (and the marlin, for that matter) with Christ and the crucifixion have, of course, already been noted by various critics⁵ and need not be rehearsed here. It is important, however, to recognize that the focus of this second span is limited; as indicated above, we are here concerned with that period of the liturgical calendar beginning on Ash Wednesday and ending on Ascension Thursday. This period includes the mortification and death of Christ, the instruction of the disciples in the meaning of Christ's sacrifice by his repeated appearances during the forty days following Easter, and two of the three mysteries that are subsumed in the Paschaltide Season—the Resurrection and the final Ascension into Heaven; it does not include the third mystery, that of the Descent of the Holy Ghost, which is not celebrated until Pentecost, ten days later.

If we look at The Old Man and the Sea with this in mind, it may clarify several matters. First, the old man, like Christ, achieves a triumph in apparent defeat. While Christ's triumph is over physical death, Santiago triumphs over the dentuso and the galanos which, though they destroy the great marlin, cannot diminish the heroism that has led to the union of man and nature climaxing the battle between fisherman and fish. In addition, Santiago is able, again like Christ, to return to his disciple with the evidence of the hero-deed that he has accomplished. This is necessary in order to make clear the significance of that deed for all men, a significance that is, of course, expressed in the novella's theme of tragic affirmation: "'But man is not made for defeat. . . . A man can be destroyed but not defeated'" (p. 114). The redemption that Santiago brings back to the world is to be found in a recognition of the deep resources of human strength made possible when man is properly attuned to his world, a strength that the old fisherman has painfully and heroically exemplified. And, although this message is not yet widely comprehended, (as underscored by the tourists at book's end) just as Christ's message was not grasped outside the faithful few, the disciple perceives completely the significance of the old man's final adventure. That it is, in fact, his final adventure, that Santiago is about to die when we last see him, although disputed by some critics, seems supported by the fact that this second eighty-seven-day period ends on Ascension Day, for, just as the Ascension is the crowing event of Christ's earthly ministry, so Santiago's sojourn in the world must be concluded once he has imparted his message of redemption. Finally, the omission of the celebration of Pentecost suggests that the redemption postulated by Hemingway in his parable is an entirely human one requiring no infusion of a mysterious outside force to be operative. That is to say that the period here paralleled is one that focuses only on the incarnate member of the Trinity, and, correspondingly, the suggestion seems to be that the hero is important because he displays the grandeur of which man is capable without the help of any external or mystical power, save that embodied in his comprehension of the union with nature that he has achieved.

Finally, it might be helpful to remember that Christ is one avatar of the figure whom Joseph Campbell calls "the hero with a thousand faces," and Santiago, obviously, can also take his place in that particular pantheon. A comparison of the events of The Old Man and the Sea with Campbell's summary of the pattern of his so-called monomyth⁶ reveals a close correspondence. The hero sets out with the aid of a helper (Manolo), crosses the threshold of adventure, ("'I went out too far,'" says Santiago [p. 133]) and meets a trial that can take many forms including the brother-battle, dragon-battle, crucifixion, and a night-sea journey, all of which can be seen as applying in some way to the old fisherman. The adventure culminates again in several possible ways, one of which is a sacred marriage, closely analogous to the union established between man and marlin at the conclusion of Santiago's epic battle ("'I have killed this fish that is my brother,'" he says [p. 105]). The hero must endure tests (the sharks) before his return to the world to which he brings some sort of boon, in Santiago's case the knowledge that man, who can be destroyed, cannot be defeated.

The liturgical gloss of incarnation and redemption outlined above is important because it strongly underlines this mythic dimension of The Old Man and the Sea —the dimension in which the book's power resides. Contrary to those critics who would minimize this work, the Christian symbolism is not simply a pat overlay attempting to give weight to an otherwise mundane story, but rather it constitutes the basic technique by which Hemingway presents his view of man as a coherent and intrinsically important part of the cosmos in which he must find value. This vision of man goes far beyond that revealed in Hemingway's earlier work. In place of the code hero, who accepted a nihilistic universe more or less passively and whose only effort was to try to come to terms with that dark vista through some personal accommodation, we have here the hero incarnate, who achieves meaning, not only personally but universally, by a full commitment to his world and through an intimate relationship with that world's creatures. Only because of this unity with nature can Santiago exercise, indeed expend, his strength and endurance as a man to achieve his final symbolic but meaningful triumph in the face of literal disaster, a triumph that carries a redemptive message for all who share the human condition. In the effective artistic communication of that redemptive message lies the brilliant achievement of The Old Man and the Sea.

Notes

¹ Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952), p. 9. Subsequent page references will be made parenthetically.

² Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 305.

³ It is possible that the allusion to three weeks functions in yet another way; the Sunday after the first three weeks of Lent is Laetare Sunday, on which the particular miracle commemorated is the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, certainly an appropriate conjunction.

⁴ Santiago is, of course, both right and wrong about this. It does not happen twice because he makes his huge catch on the eighty-fifth day, just as he had foreseen in purchasing the lottery ticket. On the other hand, the eighty-seven-day period does, in fact, play itself out without any tangible benefit to Santiago, just as before. Whether this ambiguity has anything to do with the doctrine of the Second Coming would seem to be doubtful.

⁵ For a checklist of criticism on The Old Man and the Sea see Modern Fiction Studies, 14 (1968), 361-363.

⁶ Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1956 [first publ., 1949]), pp. 245-246.