SOURCE: "Hemingway and the Christian Paradox," in Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, Vol. XXIV, No. 3, Spring, 1972, pp. 141-54.

[In the following essay, Hamilton examines the central, unifying symbols in The Old Man and the Sea—in particular the image of the fish, a Christian symbol — and argues that at the heart of the novella is the Christian paradox of man's search for God and God's simultaneous search for man.]

Little of the attention given to The Old Man and the Sea has given adequate consideration to one feature: the great fish as the central, organic, symbolic center of the novel, from which hitherto unseen meanings radiate. The idea of the fish as an organic symbol has validity for Hemingway not only historically but intellectually, his anti-intellectual pose to the contrary notwithstanding. This interpretation of the novel is supported by Hemingway's religious stance both in statement and practice, and is consistent with his established artistic method and his order of apprehension of experience as revealed in his fiction: experience first, and second, understanding.

This reading, with the fish as the organic, symbolic center, reveals the meaning of the novel in several important ways. First, one can see implicit in the novel an ironic paradox in both Hemingway's and Christian thought: the inseprability of suffering and Grace. The implicit, never explicit, statement of that paradox is characteristic of Hemingway's established symbolic usage. Second, a significant development in Hemingway's ethical thought is revealed since this reading provides an answer to the confrontation with nada, an intermittent preoccupation with Hemingway, artistically epitomized by "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." Finally, this reading of the novel is an oblique, ironic commentary on Hemingway the man: he found in the art of fiction what was denied him in life, the paradox being that his greatest art came from transmuting experience into fiction; yet in the physical part of his experience, and perhaps in the psychic as well, lay one major factor that was to contribute substantially to his death. Yet, perhaps after all, he has been like Santiago, only defeated and not destroyed.

No one was fooled, least of all Hemingway himself, by his coy ambiguity about symbols, as he expressed it in the 1958 interview with George Plimpton, or in the self-attributed statement to an old Cuban fisherman that symbolism was "a new trick of the intellectuals"; furthermore, he had stated his position earlier, and explicitly, in his famous iceberg metaphor in Death in the Afternoon.

The many perceptive essays resulting from The Old Man and the Sea are understandably often preoccupied with Santiago, as either character, symbol, or both; he is, after all, the Old Man. Santiago, however, again to state the obvious, is preoccupied also—with the great fish. The novel is replete with allusions to the fish, some considerably less than seven-eighths submerged which, in the light of Hemingway's life and method, are as unmistakeable as many readers have found the Christ-parallels with Santiago to be.

Hemingway is a singularly appropriate writer to consider in terms of a usable past, which made available to him the traditional rituals and myths of Christianity. Included in that tradition is the well-documented appearance of fish carvings and drawings, as distant in time as the early Christian catacombs, and as recent as panels, drawings, bas reliefs and other forms in many modern churches, Catholic and Protestant, all used as Christ-symbols. It is uncertain which came first, the fish symbol or the acronym, Ichthus (usually written with the Greek letters iota chi theta upsilon sigma, spelled in English Ichthus and translated "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior"); the editors of the New Catholic Encyclopedia say that it cannot be determined; it is unnecessary to do so. However, it is inconceivable for one as widely read and travelled in fishing and Christian circles as was Hemingway (a self-confessed "very dumb Catholic" in his own words, given to artistic understatement and keeping most of his symbol "under water") not to have become familiar with the fish as a God-Man symbol. Nor is it conceivable that a "dumb Catholic" given to turning experience into fiction, and whose memory was extraordinarily retentive and disciplined when he wished it to be, would fail to remember major and often repeated detail from the Mass of his church, from friends, Protestant and Catholic, and from conversation with illiterates and intellectuals.

Another of Hemingway's calculated ambiguities besides his anti-intellectualism was one which at times became almost an ambivalence: his religious stance. It is unnecessary to document whether Hemingway decided to "run as a Catholic." The important features of the factual record Baker has established in the new biography, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, are clear. Baptized in the First Congregational Church in Oak Park in 1899, he married his first wife, Hadley, a "non-believer," in a country church in 1921; his second wife, Pauline, in a Catholic service in the Paris Church of Passy; marriages three and four were civil ceremonies in 1940 and 1946. No good reason exists to doubt seriously Hemingway's own statement to his sister Sunny of his conversion to Catholicism at or about the time of his marriage to Pauline—regardless of either his self-applied label of "dumb Catholic" with more faith than knowledge or intellect, or his playing down of personal religious formalism because he did not wish to be known as a Catholic writer, primarily, it seems, for artistic reasons. After a period of religious disillusionment following the Spanish Civil War, he summarized, in 1945, his religious position as going from a fear-ridden devotion in 1918 to a religion of "humanism," much later, founded on the basis of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Later, in 1955, he reasserted his Catholicism, stated he could still go to Mass, though he had become "hardened" to the point of being unable to pray for himself. Finally, he told another Catholic convert, Gary Cooper, a hunting and fishing companion, that he, like Cooper had become a convert to Catholicism and that he still "believed in belief." Thus the usable past.

The usable past is in The Old Man and the Sea, not only in the basic story originally published in Esquire in April, 1936, but combined with the actual references in the novel is the foundation for the great fish as the central, organic, symbolic center. In the beginning of the novel, however, references seem to be merely to "a big fish," or merely barely apt metaphors, like the description of the scars on Santiago's hands as being ". . . as old as erosions in a fishless desert." One might even ask why such a metaphor at all since in realistic terms fish do not occur, except as fossil forms, in deserts anyway. Why such a poor or obscure metaphor? After Santiago refers to himself as "a strange old man," Manolo asks if Santiago is strong enough for a truly big fish; Santiago replies, "I think so. And there are many tricks." Later as they talk about the lottery, Manolo, leaving, gently reminds Santiago, "Keep warm old man. Remember we are in September." Santiago answers, "The month when the great fish come. Anyone can be a fisherman in May." No reason is present to speculate that Hemingway may have remembered that the Feast of James the Younger, cousin to Jesus, falls in May; September is also simply a good month for fishing in those waters. Later at sea on the first day out, as the sun rises higher, Santiago watches the man-of-war bird at his aerial tracking and the flying fish fleeing the dolphin, he says, "My big fish must be somewhere." Still watching and waiting, he sees other sea life around him, the turtles, the Portuguese man-of-war, and the always wheeling and circling sea birds; but, his first catch, a ten-pound tuna, is only for bait. He turns his mind resolutely away from the beloved baseball; it is a distraction. "Now is the time to think of only one thing. That which I was born for." Soon, he feels it a hundreds fathoms down tugging at the baited hook. Shortly, the great fish begins to pull man and boat.

It is here that the first hint appears which could indicate a reversal of Mark Schorer's statement, in his essay on Santiago, "With Grace Under Pressure," that the novel is a parable of a man catching a fish. Here in conjunction with other, later details, the story begins to become a subtle parable of a fish catching a man, the apotheosis of fishers of men—leading to the great paradox. "'I wish I had the boy," the old man said aloud. 'I'm being towed by a fish and I'm the towing bin.'" Four hours later, Santiago reflects, '"It was noon when I hooked him,' he said. 'And I have never seen him.'" "I wish I could see him only once to know what I have against me."

As the novel continues, following the first contact with the great fish, the identification of fish and symbol becomes clearer. However, it would be less than just to the novel to treat it as anything but a seamless fabric, of the kind Hemingway labored so hard to produce. Not just the remarks noted above, and those that follow, isolated from the context, but the configuration established by all of them is what reveals the meaning of the great fish, the Ichthus. A major aspect of Christian doctrine is the idea that (before the term "Christian" existed) it was God who sought man, through the Incarnation. Francis Thompson had expressed the idea in the Nineteenth Century in quite another kind of metaphor as "the Hound of Heaven.") In this connection to recall the quotation just cited about Santiago's memory of the time the fish was hooked, noon is the traditional though not consistently the scriptural hour of crucifixion. One must also remember what Joseph Waldmeir pointed out in a previous interpretation, "Confiteor Hominem : Ernest Hemingway's Religion of Man," that throughout the novel a symbolic shift is continually in progress. Indeed, to force a one-for-one correspondence on what Waldmeir calls a religious allegory would be to attempt what was abhorrent to Hemingway, and what was once passed off as an ill-concealed joke about the sharks and the critics. Here, while symbols shift from Christ-figure to old fisherman, from marlin to Ichthus, the identification of the fish and the emergence of the paradox of the inseparability of suffering and Grace proceed together. The continuing text of The Old Man and the Sea bears evidence, moreover, that Hemingway was doing what he said he did about art in the interview with George Plimpton. Asked by the interviewer, ". . . as a creative writer what do you think is the function of your art? Why a representation of fact, rather than fact?" Hemingway replied, "From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of."

F. I. Carpenter in his chapter on Hemingway in American Literature and the Dream described the process in these terms:

A brief, immediate experience, observed realistically, is described first as it occurred "in our time"; the protagonist is intensely moved, but remains confused, so that the meaning of it all seems nothing, or "nada." But this immediate experience recalls individual memories of other, similar experiences, or historic memories of parallel experiences in the history of other nations, or mystical, "racial" memories. And these "mediate" experiences are suggested by "flashbacks," or by conversations, or by the suggestion of recurrent myth or ritual patterns. And the fragmentary remembrances of similar experiences, by relating the individual to other people, places and times, suggest new meanings and forms. Finally, this new awareness of the patterns and meanings implicit in the immediate, individual experience intensifies it, and gives it a new "dimension" not apparent at the time it actually happened.

This new "dimension" (the word was suggested by Hemingway in The Green Hills of Africa) is Carpenter's description of what Hemingway called "the fifth dimension that can be gotten" in prose.

One recurrent myth or ritual pattern available to Hemingway was in his usable religious past. Scripture, Catholic or Protestant, is filled with the idea that while man forever seeks, but never this side of mortality finds, his God, it is God who seeks man and finds him through the Incarnation. Inexplicable though the heart of the Christian religious experience of the Incarnation is, one aspect of it seems clear: in man's search for religious experience, the crucial discovery he makes is this: through the God-Man (symbolized here by the Ichthus) God has involved himself with man, and thus man sees that if he suffers, so too does God suffer, and understands man's suffering; thus, the paradox emerges, that suffering and Grace are inextricable. So it is that Santiago's isolated individualism and human pride as a fisherman drive him beyond his limits, too far out, to rediscover the oldest human—and Christian—values: love, humility, courage, self-respect, compassion, pity, and endurance; so it was with Sophocles, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Clemens, Faulkner—and Hemingway, as Malcom Cowley observed many years ago in his introduction to The Portable Hemingway.

To return to the novel and the central, organic symbol, the great fish, as the light of the first day darkens, as Santiago wishes for the boy, he sees the friendly porpoises. "They are our brothers like the flying fish." Then Santiago ". . . began to pity the great fish he had hooked. He is wonderful and strange and who knows how old he is, he thought."

A few moments later when Santiago again wishes for Manolo while he feels the strength of the great fish through the line, Hemingway has Santiago speak a curious, puzzling sentence, followed by others which depend on the first one for the meaning of those that follow. The first sentence is, "When once, through my treachery, it had been necessary to him to make a choice, the old man thought." He continues, "His choice had been to stay in the deep dark water far out beyond all snares and traps and treacheries. My choice was to go there to find him beyond all people. Beyond all people in the world. Now we are joined together and have been since noon. And no one to help either one of us."

I suggest that the whole passage, and especially Santiago's sentence fragment, is clear if one supposes that Hemingway has simply and wisely —Santiago simply, because he is uncomfortable thinking clearly on such matters—Hemingway has simply and wisely omitted one logical main clause before the subordinate fragment; the clause he omitted might have been something like this: "(This is when the religious experience began) When once, through my treachery, it had been necessary to him to make a choice." Other passages below support this idea. In Christian thought there were two choices; the first was God's to make man free to accept or reject his God's command. In turn, man, anthropos, chose to reject, to seize divine knowledge of good and evil for himself. The second choice, again God's in response to man's treachery, was to involve himself with man in suffering and death through the Incarnation, to seek out man who had once rejected him. A few moments later Santiago seems to anticipate the inevitable end of the experience: "'Fish,' he said softly, aloud, 'I'll stay with you until I am dead.'" Again foreshadowing the tragic end to man's search for his God via the God-Man, Santiago says, "Fish, I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends."

Soon, however, he realizes the great fish suffers too, that he feels it: "'You're feeling it now, fish,' he said. 'And so, God knows, am I.'" Yet, something strange bothers Santiago as he contemplates the mysterious calm of the fish he has hooked: "But he seems calm, he thought, and following his plan. But what is his plan, he thought. And what is mine? Mine I must improvise to his because of his great size. If he will jump I can kill him. But he stays down forever. Then I will stay down with him forever."

If the great fish will only make himself visible, tangible, within the limits of human vision, Santiago can conquer him. But it is not just yet to be so. But when it happens Hemingway writes a passage unusually full of metaphor for a writer whose style is alleged to be so bare and unadorned. Santiago is to remember this moment, later, with a particular emphasis. Now, though, as the fish jumps the first time, Hemingway writes,

The line rose slowly and steadily and then the surface of the ocean bulged ahead of the boat and the fish came out. He came out unendingly and water poured from his sides. He was bright in the sun and his head and back were dark purple and in the sun the stripes on his sides showed wide and a light lavender. His sword was as long as a baseball bat and tapered like a rapier and he rose his full length from the water and then re-entered it, smoothly, like a diver and the old man saw the great scythe-blade of his tail go under and the line commenced to race out.

Now that Santiago has at last seen the great fish, his anxiety, instead of being relieved, grows. Many commentators have noted Santiago's "lazy religiosity" expressed through the promise to say ten Our Fathers and Hail Marys and to make a pilgrimage, later. This is consistent with the shifting symbols; it is Santiago as man, anthropos, and Santiago as the Cuban fisherman, fishing for Ichthus, and for marlin, who prays, "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen." Then he adds, "Blessed Virgin, pray for the death of this fish. Wonderful though he is."

Wonderful though the fish is, Santiago knows what he himself must do.

"I'll kill him though," he said. "In all his greatness and his glory."

Although it is unjust, he thought. But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures.

It is just after sunset of the first day that Santiago begins to realize his true relationship to the fish. "The fish is my friend too,' he said aloud. 'I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him.'" Killing the fish, the tangible, shinging great fish, with the purple stripes on his sides is a possible thing; killing is at least within the pitifully human limits of human ability and comprehension. Thus Santiago adds, "I am glad we do not have to kill the stars." A moment later Santiago reflects, "How many people will he feed, he thought. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behaviour and his great dignity." Santiago's thoughts are at least suggestive of parts of the familiar Protestant Prayer of Humble Access following the consecration: "We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat. . . and drink . . . that our sinful bodies may be made clean . . . and our souls washed. . . ." (The Oxford American Prayer Book [N.Y., 1950], Commentary by Massey H. Shepherd, Jr.). This is the passage used in the Protestant Episcopal service, the substance of which is fairly familiar to most other Protestant denominations. This prayer does not appear in the Catholic Missal, but a similar passage does. The Priest-Celebrant says, "Let not the sharing of your body, O Lord Jesus Christ, which I [who] am unworthy make bold to receive, become my judgment and condemnation. But through your goodness may it be my safeguard and a healing remedy both of soul and body: . . ." (The New Saint Andrew Bible Missal. Prepared by a Missal Commission of Saint Andrew's Abbey [New York: Benziger Bros., 1957]). It is also conceivable that submerged beneath Santiago's question "How many people will he feed" was the memory in Hemingway's mind of a homily delivered during the Mass, on the parable of the loaves and the fishes.

Santiago is beginning to understand the experience now, at his own level of understanding, because he has felt it, in his back, in his treacherous left hand, in his aching body, in his hunger, his thirst, and his loneliness. Still, persist he must, and now states the tragic and inexplicable paradox that he must kill his brother, the great fish, that man must kill his God: "I do not understand these things, he thought. But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers."

By the third day the great fish has begun to circle and the final struggle is to come. Santiago is afraid that his prey will escape him, that the fish will throw the hook. As the fish strikes the wire leader, Santiago thinks of his own pain, and the pain of the fish. "I must hold his pain where it is, he thought. Mine does not matter. I can control mine. But his pain could drive him mad." The words suggest perhaps dimly the great human cry, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?" The great unbearable pain of the final agony of death.

When the fish is harpooned, Santiago goes for the heart, not the head. As the fish is circling, ever more slowly, the identification of man and fish, anthropos and Ichthus, is reinforced as Santiago says, "'Fish,' the old man said. 'Fish, you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?'" When the climactic harpooning comes, Hemingway writes, "The old man dropped the line and put his foot on it and lifted the harpoon as high as he could and drove it down with all his strength, and more strength he had just summoned, into the fish's side just behind the great chest fin that rose high in the air to the altitude of the man's chest. He felt the iron go in and he leaned on it and drove it furher and then pushed all his weight after it." The moment of death is vivid. "Then the fish came alive, with his death in him, and rose high out of the water showing all his great length and width and all his power and beauty. He seemed to hang in the air above the old man in the skiff." The first part of the passage suggests in the movement of the sentences and concentration on physical sensation the coup de grace at the crucifixion, with the iron spear driven into the side below the chest; the French phrase expresses, quite incidentally, a bitterly ironic play on the term grace. The second part, the vision Santiago sees of the final agonized leap of the fish, suggests something like the transfiguration (preceding the crucifixion in time) with the fish hanging, almost suspended, in the air above the old man's head.

The entire passage illustrates clearly the shifting in symbolic statement, this one a shift in time rather than identity. Both paragraphs, however, reinforce, by what they suggest, the identity of the symbols, man and fish, killer and killed, man and God-Man, anthropos and Ichthus.

Now, as Santiago sees the fish lying dead in the water, he notes again the color, the strange appearance. "The fish had turned silver from his original purple and silver, and the stripes showed the same pale violet colour as his tail. They were wider than a man's hand with his fingers spread and the fish's eye looked as detached as the mirrors in a periscope or as a saint in a procession." Somehow, Santiago cannot let go of the vision of the great leap of the great fish into his sight; on the disastrous return trip, he recalls the moment when the sudden, flashing leap from the water, the sudden vision, had come: "At one time when he was feeling so badly toward the end, he had thought perhaps it was a dream. Then when he had seen the fish come out of the water and hang motionless in the sky before he fell, he was sure there was some great strangeness and he could not believe it. Then he could not see well, although now he saw as well as ever." Now come the sharks. "The shark was not an accident. He had come up from down deep in the water as the dark cloud of blood had settled and dispersed in the mile deep sea." The description of the shark is as vivid as that of the great fish. Santiago kills the first one and hope returns. He reflects that it is silly not to hope. "I am a man," he says, "but not unarmed."

At this crucial point, Santiago begins the long colloquy with himself on the meaning of what he has done. It is a passage that illustrates more clearly than the preceding examples what I have referred to as Hemingway's order of apprehension, experience first, then understanding. In its entirety it amounts to a statement of the cruel paradox of love and killing and life and death and sin, inextricably intermingled ever since the God-Man, the Ichthus, was killed. As the conversation with himself proceeds, Santiago reminds himself that what he has done is a sin. He tries to dismiss the deadly abstraction. Enough problems exist without taking up sin. "Do not think about sin," he thought. "There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it." But the idea persists; DiMaggio and the radio cannot drive it out of his consciousness: ". . . he thought much and he kept on thinking about sin. 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, is it not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?

'You think too much, old man,' he said aloud."

The ravenous, destroying sharks continue their bloody work. Not wanting to see, nevertheless he looks again at what was his great fish. Now, understanding the experience, he says the first time what he is to say twice more, "'I shouldn't have gone out so far, fish,' he said. 'Neither for you nor for me. I'm sorry, fish.'" It was bad, for man and fish, for anthropos and lchthus, to have gone out so far—or to echo what seems to me to be Baker's clear implication. to try to reconcile the temporal and the eternal. God must, through the God-Man, die in "going so far out" to seek the man he has given free choice of acceptance or rejection; man, as mortal, must die in going too far out, beyond all people, to seek out his God. Both must suffer a death.

The second time Santiago considers the idea of "going out too far," the metaphysical dilemma seems too much for him. "'Half fish,' he said. 'Fish that you were. I am sorry that I went too far out. I ruined us both. But we have killed many sharks, you and I, and ruined many others. How many did you ever kill, old fish? You do not have that spear on your head for nothing.'" Finally, on the third day early in the evening with the phosphorescence shining in the sea and the strange coppery sweet taste in his mouth, Santiago reflects once more, "And what beat you, he thought. 'Nothing,' he said aloud. 'I went out too far.'"

The story proceeds to the end at the everyday level of fisherman and interdependence, as Clinton Burhans has suggested, of Santiago and Manolo, and as it does so, the experience is practically completed. So, almost, is the understanding. Santiago sees that the lights on the Terrace are out; everyone is in bed. He has now only to unstep the mast, stumble and climb, bone weary, up the hill and go to sleep. Then, wakened once he tells Manolo he knows how to care for his wounded hands, but adds, "In the night I spat something strange and felt something in my chest was broken." Now he goes back to sleep and dreams, not of the fish or the sea or the sharks or the ever circling birds, but of his boyhood memory of the lions playing on the beach.

The experience is nearly complete. But not quite. At his best, Hemingway does not waste his endings. The last episode with the party of tourists at the dockside cafe is the final and ironic statement of the inexplicable mystery of the experience. The woman tourist seeing the skeleton and the great tail at the side of Santiago's boat in the water asks an attending waiter, "What's that?" Misunderstanding her question the waiter tells her that a shark had done the damage to Santiago's catch. Now the misunderstanding is misunderstood, the irony is complete. The woman's reply is that of the outsider to the experience, the uninvolved. It is also an extraordinarily simple yet subtle statement, consistently Hemingway, that no one without the experience can understand its full meaning.

She says, "'I didn't know sharks had such handsome, beautifully formed tails.' 'I didn't either,' her male companion said." Meanwhile Santiago lies in cruciform sleep with manolo sitting quietly by and watching over him; Manolo, Emmanuel; it is he who has been sent to watch over him. He, watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps.

The great symbols, man and fish, man and God-Man, have been joined. They are bound together, each seeking the other, each seeming to kill the other each suffering the other's suffering in a dialog of life and death, of man and God, a dialog on the tragic inevitability of involvement, on man's search for his God while God, eagerly, lovingly, and at least in Christian eyes redemptively, seeks out man—this is the Christian paradox.

What Wilbur T. Urban in Language and Reality has called the symbolic consciousness has been at work. It recognizes, says Urban, that the symbol taken literally in fiction, but taken another way (the symbolic way) has truth; the symbolic consciousness is always dual—operating to use symbols both as truth and as fiction. Bern Oldsey in his "The Snows of Ernest Hemingway" has succinctly summarized the method here when he says that Hemingway's symbols are "situationaly determined and ironically controlled."

Perhaps none but Hemingway himself could, or did, settle the personal religious question of whether he decided, once, "to run as a Christian"; but one question of literary art Hemingway answered and put there, truly, as he would say, for us to see: whatever the answer to religious speculations, however much of God is or is not in his works, however consistent his religiosity was or was not, he was a knowledgeable, consciously thinking artist and craftsman above all. As he wrote in Death in the Afternoon, "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water." In The Old Man and the Sea Hemingway has through artistic use of a symbol, the great fish, relevant at all levels, given unity to the work as a whole, and great dignity and enriched meaning to all aspects of the novel. This reading gives a new, fresh insight into this novel which has as much relevance for modern man, caught in his own existential trap, as Oedipus did for Sophocles's audience, struggling in his way out of his spiritual dilemma. Hemingway joined the company of the thought-divers, as Emerson called them, deep diving men who find in art the means to tell other men where they have been.

Ample critical opinion and biographical evidence exist as to where Hemingway had been: in battle and in bed; in love, and out; in drinking bouts with friends and in lonely places by himself. Praise and understanding of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is essentially unanimous, whether from a writer with a particular thesis, such as John Killinger in Hemingway and the Dead Gods, or from a relatively dispassionate biographer like Baker, who says that short story ". . . was autobiographical only in the sense that it offered a brief look into the underside of Ernest's spiritual world, the nightmare of nothingness by which he was still [in 1933] haunted." If The Old Man and the Sea is read in the sense I have proposed, both Santiago as character and the novel as a whole are circumstantial but ethically and artistically satisfying evidence of Hemingway's discovery of an answer to the same spectre which haunted Sartre and Unamuno, and which Hemingway so superbly confronted in artistic form in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."

The old waiter, without a wife, one of Hemingway's sleepless men, knows because he has felt it, the loneliness of the old man who comes each night, seeking respite from darkness and despair through drink in a clean, well-lighted place, with only the shadows of the leaves of the trees against the wall outside to remind him of the shadows in his soul; with brandy as an anodyne against the memory of suicide, the final despair, the unforgiveable sin, from which "plenty of money" will not buy absolution. The old waiter's parody of the Lord's Prayer is the appropriate vehicle to express the despair which joins him to the old man; his parody substitutes existential despair, nada — nothingness—for every meaningful concept; it expresses the terror of the underside of the spiritual world of both the old waiter and the old man, who must keep seeking clean, well-lighted places until the darkness is dispelled by day, and they can sleep.

The story has had so much critical attention and been so widely reprinted that one need only point out what has not received attention in this context, the relevant concepts which the old waiter's parody of the Lord's Prayer eliminates by substituting nada for them. As found in the Missal and in the Protestant Bible, and without the final clause "for thine is the kingdom and glory forever," which is non-scriptural, those concepts, perhaps over-simplified, are these:

Our Father who are in heaven	the Fatherhood of God
Hallowed be Thy name	the sacred nature of the implied man-God relationship
Thy kingdom come	implicit faith in a divinely ordained order
Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven	acceptance of divine will, the omnipresence of God, and the existence of a hereafter
Give us this day our daily bread	man's physical dependence on God's physical order of life-sustenance
And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors	forgiveness by God of man for wrong-doing, and a reciprocal forgiveness by man of man for wrongdoing
Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil	Existence of a choice between good and evil, and thus necessarily existence of both good and evil to choose between
(The prayer being spoken by Jesus implies in context	the humanity and the divinity of Jesus)

If one contemplates the obliteration of these concepts, the substitution of nada for them, then the human and spiritual horror of the old waiter's parody, and the terror of the old man who sought out a clean (good?), well-lighted place, is present in all its deadly meaning. Without these concepts, what is left—physically, spiritually, theologically—but annihilation, nada?

On the other hand, if one accepts the multiple meanings of The Old Man and the Sea already proposed, as well as this one which is complementary and not contradictory, and, if "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" can be read as an artistic statement of the confrontation with nada, then The Old Man and the Sea seems to restore sanity, order, and meaning to the kind of world in which "only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built," as Bertrand Russell described it in "A Free Man's Worship" in 1903 when Hemingway was but a child of four. It is the "unyielding despair" which haunts the old man and the old waiter—as well as other of Hemingway's characters who have been called sleepless men.

Thus it seems to me that Hemingway has in many of his works and in one short story in particular recapitulated at least one of the gravest personal, ethical, and spiritual problems of modern man, and in the sense I have proposed, The Old Man and the Sea can be read as an artistically expressed reaction to it. Hemingway's answer to "the firm foundation of unyielding despair," nada, can I think, be seen in The Old Man and the Sea, in the tragedy of an old man who almost unknowing discovered in a great fish the great paradox of suffering and Grace; who, enduring almost intolerable pain, experienced the awe, the mystery of existence in a few moments of insight into the loneliness of the hostile forces on a cruel and unyielding ocean; who thought he knew he must struggle alone, flying the "flag of permanent defeat" at his mast, but discovered an answer in the terrible depths of the sea, la mar, the unyielding Mother of Life as man knows it; he found it in a union with his own past, and the company of a boy who may have been the one "sent"—sent to remind him of his own past, and to give him love that expected nothing in return, and to heal the unseen wounds of his spirit.

If the wounds of Santiago's spirit can be understood as symbolized by the scars on his hands, "old as erosions in a fishless desert," they bear a kinship to the Great Fish which serves, as Wilbur Urban has put it, as an insight symbol.

The peculiar character of such symbols lies in the fact that they do not point to or lead to, but they lead into. They do not merely represent, through partial coincidence, characters and relations; they are . . . a vehicle or medium of insight. But while the merely intrinsic symbol only represents, the insight symbol makes us see. . . . The essential element . . . is the notion of an ideal or spiritual world, insight into which is given only through the sensuous. [Italics supplied]. . . . The notion of God as father is not merely a descriptive symbol, but one by means of which we are given not only pictorial knowledge about, but actual insight into the nature of spiritual relations.

This is precisely the function which Santiago's scarred hands, his aching body, Manolo, the sea, and the great fish—the Ichthus —serve: leading Santiago into, giving him insight into the nature of a spiritual relationship. In going out too far, Santiago gained insight into an inescapable paradox.

Ernest Hemingway's own personal and tragic paradox was the fact that felt and understood experience was the source of his art; yet, in an incessant, brutally punishing, seemingly compulsive, and often nearly deadly search for that experience, he wore down the body and spirit he was so proud of, until his resources of body and mind, finally exhausted, ended with suicide, what for him may or may not have been the unforgiveable sin of Despair; the medical records do not so indicate. The old man is finally at rest.