SOURCE: "The Old Man and the Sea," in Ernest Hemingway and the Pursuit of Heroism, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1968, pp. 159-74.

[In the following chapter from a full-length book about Hemingway's notion of heroism, which is a revised version of an article that originally appeared in College English in 1955, Gurko examines The Old Man and the Sea in the context of Hemingway's other work, seeing it as a movement away from society and its artifices to the challenges of nature and the possibility for liberation of the human spirit.]

The hero of Hemingway's last story is an aged Cuban fisherman named Santiago. he is more than a hero; he is a superman. Though very old, he has the physical strength of a young man and a spirit that is absolutely indomitable. Everything about him is outsized: his age, strength, his cheerful disposition, even the run of extraordinary bad luck he has at the start of the book—he has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. When on the eighty-fifth day he does catch one, it is record-breaking, a sixteen-hundred-pound marlin, so large, powerful, and symbolic as to complete a cosmic trilogy with Jonah's whale and Moby Dick.

On several occasions Santiago is compared with Christ. His raw bleeding hands during the ordeal with the marlin recall Christ's mutilated hands. His last trip up the hill to his hut, carrying the mast on his back, is a deliberate analogy to Christ bearing his cross to Calvary. There are not enough of these resemblances to argue that the fisherman is a modern Christ and his story a retelling of the New Testament. But the connections with Jesus, half-man, half-God, are enough to draw Santiago out of a purely human frame toward the superhuman.

Hemingway's novels are profound inquiries into the possibilities of heroism. Most of them emphasize the obstacles to achieving it, and define the world's limitations, cruelties, or built-in evil. The Old Man and the Sea is remarkable for its stress on what men can do and on the world as an arena where heroic deeds are totally possible. Like Hemingway's other protagonists, Santiago is confronted with a universe filled with tragedy and pain, but these are transcended, and the affirming tone is in sharp contrast to the pessimism permeating such books as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms.

One aspect of this universe, familiar from the earlier works, is its changelessness. The round of nature—which includes human nature—is not only eternal but eternally the same. The sun not only rises; it rises always, and sets and rises again without change of rhythm. The relationship of nature to man proceeds through basic patterns that never vary. Therefore, despite the fact that a story by Hemingway is always full of action, the action takes place inside a world that is fundamentally constant.

Moreover, its processes are purely secular in character: Hemingway's figures are often religious, but their religion is peripheral rather than central to their lives. In The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago is a primitive Cuban, at once religious and superstitious. Yet neither his religion nor his superstitious beliefs are relevant to his tragic experience with the great marlin; they do not create it or in any way control its meaning. The fisherman himself relies on his own resources and not on God (in whom, however, he devoutly believes, just as Jake Barnes, while calling himself a bad Catholic, is also a devout believer). If he succeeds in catching the fish, he "will say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys . . . and make a pilgrimage to the Virgen de Cobre," but these are rituals that come after the event and have no significant relationship with it.

In this universe, changeless and unaffected by divinity, everyone has his fixed role to play. Santiago's role is to pursue the great marlin. "That which I was born for," he reflects. The marlin's is to live in the deepest parts of the sea and escape the pursuit of man. The two of them struggle with each other to the death, but without animosity or hatred. On the contrary, the old man feels a deep affection and admiration for the fish. He admires its great strength as it pulls his skiff out to sea, and becomes conscious of its nobility as the two grow closer and closer together, in spirit as well as space, during their long ordeal on the Gulf Stream. In the final struggle between them, his hands bleeding, his body racked with fatigue and pain, the old man reflects in his exhaustion:

You are killing me, fish. . . . But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or a more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.

On the homeward journey, with the marlin tied to the boat and already under attack from sharks, Santiago establishes his final relationship with the fish, that great phenomenon of nature:

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.

A sense of brotherhood and love, in a world in which everyone is killing or being killed, binds together the creatures of nature, establishes between them a unity and an emotion which transcends the destructive pattern in which they are caught. In the eternal round, each living thing, man and animal, acts out its destiny according to the drives of its species, and in the process becomes a part of the profound harmony of the natural universe. This harmony, taking into account the hard facts of pursuit, violence, and death but reaching a state of feeling beyond them, is a primary aspect of Hemingway's view of the world. Even the sharks have their place. They are largely scavengers, but the strongest and most powerful among them, the great Mako shark which makes its way out of the deep part of the sea, shares the grandeur of the marlin. Santiago kills him but feels identified with him as well:

But you enjoyed killing the dentuso, he thought. He lives on the live fish as you do. He is not a scavenger nor just a moving appetite as some sharks are. He is beautiful and noble and knows no fear of anything.

Nature not only has its own harmony and integration but also its degrees of value. In The Old Man and the Sea this is contained in the idea of depth. The deeper the sea the more valuable the creatures living there and the more intense the experience deriving from it. On the day that he catches the great marlin, the old man goes much farther out than the other fishermen and casts bait in much deeper water. The marlin itself is a denizen of the profounder depths. Even the Mako shark lives in the deep water and its speed, power, and directness are qualities associated with depth. There are, in fact, two orders in every species: the great marlins and the lesser, the great sharks and the smaller, bad-smelling, purely scavenger sharks who dwell in shallower water and attack with a sly indirectness in demeaning contrast with the bold approach of the Mako. There are also two kinds of men—as there have always been in Hemingway—the greater men and the lesser, heroes and ordinary humans.

Santiago is the clearest representation of the hero because he is the only major character in Hemingway who has not been permanently wounded or disillusioned. Romero, at the other end of the age scale, is the closest to him in this respect, but his disillusionment has already begun with his savage beating by Cohn and his desertion by Brett. Santiago's heroic side is suggested throughout. Once, in Casablanca, he defeated a huge Negro from Cienfuegos at the hand game and was referred to thereafter as El Campeón. Now in his old age, he is hero-worshipped by the boy, Manolin, who wants always to fish with him, or, when he cannot, at least to help him even with his most menial chores. At sea Santiago, sharing the Cuban craze for baseball, thinks frequently of Joe DiMaggio, the greatest ballplayer of his generation, and wonders whether DiMaggio, suffering from a bone spur in his heel, ever endured the pain to which the marlin is now subjecting him. At night, when he sleeps, he dreams of the lions he had seen, in his younger days, playing on the beaches of Africa. The constant association with the king of ballplayers and the king of beasts adds to the old man's heroic proportions.

To be a hero means to dare more than other men, to expose oneself to greater dangers, and therefore more greatly to risk the possibilities of defeat and death. On the eighty-fifth day after catching his last fish, Santiago rows far beyond the customary fishing grounds; as he drops his lines into water of unplumbed depth he sees the other fishermen, looking very small, strung out in a line far inland between himself and the shore. Because he is out so far, he catches the great fish. But because the fish is so powerful, it pulls his skiff even farther out—so far from shore that they cannot get back in time to prevent the marlin, once he is captured, from being chewed to pieces by the sharks.

"I shouldn't have gone out so far, fish," he said. "Neither for you nor for me. I'm sorry, fish."

The greatness of the experience and the inevitability of the loss are bound up together. Nature provides us with boundless opportunities for the great experience if we have it in us to respond. The experience carries with it its heavy tragic price, but no matter. It is worth it.

When Santiago at last returns with the marlin still lashed to the skiff but eaten away to the skeleton, he staggers uphill to his hut, groaning under the weight of the mast. He falls asleep exhausted and dreams of the African lions. The next morning the other fishermen gaze in awe at the size of the skeleton, measure it to see by how much it is record-breaking, while the reverential feeling of Manolin for the old fisherman is strongly reinforced. Everyone has somehow been uplifted by the experience. Even on the lowest, most ignorant level, it creates a sensation. The tourists in the last scene of the story mistake the marlin for a shark, but they, too, are struck by a sense of the extraordinary.

The world not only contains the possibilities of heroic adventure and emotion to which everyone, on whatever level, can respond, but it also has continuity. Santigo is very old and has not much time left. But he has been training Manolin to pick up where he leaves off. The boy has been removed by his parents from the old man's boat because of his bad luck, but this in no way diminishes the boy's eagerness to be like Santiago. The master-pupil relationship between them suggests that the heroic impulse is part of a traditional process handed down from one generation to another, that the world is a continuous skein of possibility and affirmation. This affirming note, subdued in Hemingway's earlier fiction, is sounded here with unambiguous and unrestricted clarity.

Heightening and intensifying these already magnified effects is the extraordinary beauty of nature, which continually astonishes us with its sensuous intoxications. The account of the sea coming to life at dawn is one of the most moving passages in the story, supplemented later at rhapsodic intervals by the drama of the great pursuit. This comes to its visual climax with the first great jump of the marlin when, for the first time, Santiago sees the gigantic size of his prey. Hemingway pays very close attention to the rippling and fluting of the water, to wind currents, the movements of turtles, fish, and birds, the rising of sun and stars. One is filled not simply with a sense of nature's vastness, but of her enchantment. This enchantment adds an aesthetic dimension to Santiago's adventure, an adventure whose heroism invests it with moral meaning and whose invocation of comradeship and identity supply it with emotional grandeur.

Within this universe, where there is no limit to the depth of experience, learning how to function is of the greatest importance. It is not enough to have the will to experience; one must also have technique. If will is what enables one to live, technique is what enables one to live successfully. Santiago is not a journeyman fisherman, but a superb craftsman who knows his business thoroughly and practices it with great skill. He keeps his lines straight where others allow them to drift with the current. "It is better to be lucky," he thinks. "But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready." To be ready, with all one's professional as well as psychological resources—that is the imperative. One reason that Hemingway's stories are so crammed with technical details about fishing, hunting, bullfighting, boxing, and war is his belief that professional technique is the quickest and surest way of getting into the sensory universe. Men should study the world into which they are born as the most serious of all subjects; they can live in it successfully only to the degree that they handle themselves with skill. Life is more than an endurance contest. It is also an art, with rules, rituals, and methods that, once learned, lead to mastery.

Furthermore, when the great trial comes, one must be alone. The pressure and the agony cannot be shared or sloughed off on others, but must be endured alone. Santiago, his hands chafed and bleeding from the pull of the marlin, his face cut, in a state of virtual prostration from his struggle, several times wishes the boy were with him to ease the strain, but it is essential that he go unaccompanied, that in the end he rely on his own resources and endure his trial unaided.

At the bottom of this necessity for solitariness, there is the incurable reliance on the individual which makes Hemingway the great contemporary inheritor of the romantic tradition. The stripping-down of existence to the struggle between individual man and the natural world, during the course of which he rises to the highest levels of himself, has an early expression in Keats's line, "Then on the shore of the wide world I stand alone. . . ." In modern fiction it is Melville and Conrad who give this theme its most significant shape. The mysterious, inscrutable, dramatic nature into which their heroes plunge themselves in search of self-realization supplies Hemingway with the scaffolding for The Old Man and the Sea. Like Captain Ahab, like Lord Jim, Santiago is pitched into the dangerous ocean; for only there, and with only himself to fall back on, can he work out his destiny and come to final terms with life.

The concept of the hero whose triumph consists of stretching his own powers to their absolute limits regardless of the physical results gives The Old Man and the Sea a special place among its author's works. This theme of unqualified affirmation, that had begun to be struck in Across the River and Into the Trees, is presented here much more convincingly. Colonel Cantwell, of the immediately preceding novel, is forever talking about his heroism; Santiago acts his out. Cantwell reminisces on past triumphs; the old fisherman demonstrates them before our eyes. The strain of boastful exhibitionism that sometimes caused Hemingway to be regarded as an adolescent Byron spoiled Cantwell's story. It is almost totally absent from Santiago's.

Here we enter a world that has become, to some degree, less frightening than in the early stories. The world which injured Jake Barnes so cruelly, pointlessly deprived Lieutenant Henry of his one love, destroyed Harry Morgan at the height of his powers, and stripped Robert Jordan of his political idealism has now begun to regain its balance. It is no longer the bleak trap within which man is doomed to struggle, suffer, and die as bravely as he can, but a meaningful, integrated structure that challenges our resources, holds forth rich emotional rewards for those who live in it daringly and boldly, though continuing to exact heavy payment from them in direct proportion to how far they reach out for experience. There is no less tragedy than before, but life has lost its bleakness and accidentality, and become purposive. It is this sense of purposiveness that makes its first appearance in Hemingway's work, and sets off The Old Man and the Sea from his other fiction.

After the First World War the traditional hero disappeared from Western literature. He was replaced in one form or another by Mr. K., the harassed victim of the haunting, nightmarish novels of Franz Kafka. Hemingway's protagonists, from Nick Adams on, were hemmed in like Mr. K. by a bewildering and menacing cosmos. The huge complex mushrooming of technology and urban society began to smother the individual's sense of identity and freedom of action. In his own life Hemingway tended to avoid the industrialized countries, including his own, and was drawn to the primitive places of Spain, Africa, and Cuba. There, the ancient struggle and harmony between man and nature still existed, and the heroic possibilities so attractive to Hemingway's temperament had freer play. In the drama of Santiago, a drama entirely outside the framework of modern society and its institutions, he was able to bring these possibilities to their full fruition, and rediscover, in however specialized a context, the hero lost in the twentieth century.

Thus The Old Man and the Sea is the culmination of Hemingway's long search for disengagement from the social world and total entry into the natural. This emerges more clearly than ever before as one of the major themes in his career both as writer and man. Jake and Bill are happy only in the remote countryside outside Burguete, away from the machinery of postwar Europe. It is when Lieutenant Henry signs his separate peace, deserts from the Italian army, and retires with his love to the high Swiss mountains far removed from the man-made butchery of the war that he enjoys his brief moment of unclouded bliss. The defeated writer in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," as he lies dying, laments his inability to free himself from the temptations of money, fashion, the life of sophisticated dilettantism, and thinks of his lost talent as resting unspoiled on the remote virginal snows cresting the summit of an African mountain (height on land is the moral equivalent in Hemingway to depth in the sea). Robert Jordan must first disengage himself from the political machinery of Spain before the act of sacrificing his life for his comrades can acquire its note of pure spiritual exaltation.

The movement away from society and its artifices is not motivated by the desire to escape but by the desire for liberation. Hemingway seeks to immerse himself totally in nature not to "evade his responsibilities" but to free his moral and emotional self. Since life in society is necessarily stunting and artificial, cowardice consists not of breaking out of it but of continuing in it. To be true to oneself makes a return to the lost world of nature imperative. And that lost world, as The Old Man and the Sea reveals, has its own responsibilities, disciplines, moralities, and all-embracing meaning quite the equivalent of anything present in society and of much greater value because it makes possible a total response to the demands upon the self. Santiago is the first of the major figures in Hemingway who is not an American, and who is altogether free of the entanglements of modern life. It is toward the creation of such a figure that Hemingway has been moving, however obscurely, from the beginning. His ability to get inside this type of character without the fatal self-consciousness that mars so much literary "primitivism" is a measure of how far he has succeeded, in imagination at least, in freeing himself from the familiar restraints of convention.

In this movement from the confinements of society to the challenges of nature, Hemingway is most closely linked to Conrad. Conrad thrust his Europeans into the pressures of the Malayan archipelago and darkest Africa because he was convinced that only when removed from the comforts and protective mechanisms of civilization could they be put to the test. In his one London novel, The Secret Agent, Conrad demonstrated that suffering and tragedy were as possible in Brixton and Camberwell as off the Java coast; heroism, however, was not, and The Secret Agent stands as his one major work that has no hero.

This embracing of nature has nothing of Rousseau in it; it is not a revulsion against the corruption and iniquities of urban life. It is, instead, a flight from safety and the atrophying of the spirit produced by safety. It is for the sake of the liberation of the human spirit rather than the purification of social institutions that Conrad and Hemingway play out their lonely dramas in the bosom of nature.

Because The Old Man and the Sea records this drama in its most successful form, it gives off in atmosphere and tone a buoyant sense of release that was new in Hemingway. The story may well have been less a capstone of Hemingway's extraordinary career than a fresh emotional point of departure for the work that, because of illness and death, he was never to complete.