SOURCE: "The Old Man and the Sea: A New Hemingway Hero," in Discourse: A Review of the Liberal Arts, Vol. IX, No. 3, Summer, 1966, pp. 283-94.

[In the following essay, Hovey rejects earlier interpretations of Santiago as a Christ-figure and Aristotelian tragic hero, seeing him rather as a more believable character than those found in Hemingway's other works; he is representative of the human race and the novella "reconciles us to our human condition."]

In 1950 Hemingway embarrassed us with his worst book, Across the River and into the Trees. Two years later, he astonished us with The Old Man and the Sea. Somehow he had regained control of his art. Out of his inner conflicts as a man and artist he had achieved a harmony which makes this, in a classical sense, the sweetest and most serene of his works. Whatever its shortcomings, The Old Man and the Sea will stand in relation to the body of Hemingway's writings as Billy Budd does to Melville's.

Both authors explored the power of blackness. In each of these books they tried, near the end of their careers, to say yea to life. Whether or not Hemingway wins us over to an affirmation, we have here his most philosophical story. A tale of adventure, The Old Man and the Sea is also one of those fictions where the thought and the action are one. We might label it Hemingway's summa—the summa of his lifelong preoccupation with the questions of evil, of heroism, and of love. His subject is man-in-nature and the nature of man. For all his affectionate description of nature's beauties, Hemingway never lets us forget the Darwinian struggle going on beneath and above the Gulf waters. Against such naturalism, we are made continually aware of Santiago's fellow-feelings for nature's creatures. His tenderness toward them reminds us of Francis of Assisi.

This dualism is embodied in the old Cuban fisherman. Santiago is unique among Hemingway heroes. By chance, not by choice, is his manhood challenged. He is not on a battlefield or in a bullring or meeting a lion's charge or otherwise facing the likelihood of sudden death—nor is he recovering from a wound. With a long streak of bad luck behind him, Santiago at the start is more like, say, a farmer who has had a series of poor harvests. His predicament is that of average humanity in its day-to-day effort to keep going. That is why he is more broadly representative of the human race than any other Hemingway character. In fact, his is precisely the sort of figure so far absent from Hemingway's fiction.

Of course Santiago demonstrates and lives the "code." But, though sometimes his strife becomes violent and desperate, he is not a desperate man and is without inward violence. He is more or less at peace with himself and he is not at war with his world. His physical heroism is incidental to the routine need of earning his daily bread. Since what he endures is not edged by masochism, it never exacerbates our nerves. Naturally we feel with Santiago his hurts; but these occupy us, as they do him, more as practical impediments than badges of heroism.

Besides, of all the Hemingway protagonists, Santiago is closest to nature—feels himself a part of nature; he even believes he has hands and feet and a heart like the big turtles'. At first we think of him as a simple man, a primitive. Under such a guise, however, we have a wonderfully sensitive and contemplative person. He by no means lives—in Socratic phrase—the unexamined life. He asks the eternal questions. We can easily imagine another old fisherman undergoing Santiago's ordeal with equal physical courage and yet never having the surface of his mind or conscience troubled. On those vast blue waters Santiago is a speck of intense human consciousness. It is because he is so aware of himself and the world around him that he calls himself, more than once, "a strange old man." This is also why the boy, Manolin, tells him, "There are many good fisherman and some great ones. But there is only you.'" For the essence of Santiago's test is spiritual—a question of what shall a man believe. And the essential courage he demonstrates is moral—even intellectual—courage in his ceaseless self-examination.

What comes of his self-examination, this inquiry into the nature of man, these questions put to the universe? On the Gulf waters Santiago meditates on the drama of love against hate and of life against death which nature eternally stages for us. He thinks the little terns have a harder life than we human beings have: "Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?" But for Santiago the ocean is not necessarily an antagonist. He regards it "as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things, it was because she could not help them." When he gets farther out, he sees a man-of-war bird circling and diving, and then "flying fish spurt out of the water and sail desperately over the surface." Santiago knows that the fish fly so desperately because dolphins are chasing them while the bird is trying to catch one of them: "It is a big school of dolphin, he thought. They are widespread and the flying fish have little chance. The bird has no chance. The flying fish are too big for him and they go too fast." Though always Santiago feels involved in affectionate kinship with creatures who must prey on one another, he knows he in his turn must prey on them. These musings—the torment of their ambivalence and of their ambiguities—are of course dramatized in his struggle with the big fish.

When his marlin begins to nibble at the bait, Santiago is by turn seductive and prayerful. He hooks the fish at noon, and all the rest of that day and all of the following night the marlin tows his skiff farther from land. They are joined together, he remarks; "And no one to help either one of us." He has been remembering the time he hooked one of a pair of marlin; how "the hooked fish, the female, made a wild, panic-stricken, despairing fight that soon exhausted her"; how the male stayed with her; how after Santiago had landed her, "the male fish jumped high into the air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep. . . ." Among the marlins, this was "the saddest thing" Santiago had ever seen. "He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed." These reflections stir guilt in Santiago simply because he is a fisherman. "But that was the thing that I was born for," so he answers his doubts. Then in words which might remind us of the marriage vow—"'Fish,' he said softly, aloud, 'I'll stay with you until I am dead.'" Then, a little later: "'Fish, he said, 'I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.'" At this moment a tired little warbler lights for a few seconds on the taut line between man and fish. Santiago thinks of the hawks which may soon come after it and apologizes that he cannot take the bird home with him. "Take a good rest, small bird,' he said. Then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish.'"

As the hours grind away and Santiago's hand bleeds from a line burn and the other hand stiffens and cramps, to regain his strength he eats some raw fish. "I wish I could feed the fish, he thought. He is my brother. But I must kill him and keep strong to do it." When the fish jumps and for the first time shows its huge size, Santiago tells himself he must never let the fish know how strong it is. "But, thank God," he adds, "they are not as intelligent as we who kill them; although they are more noble and more able." As the day wears on and Santiago wears down, he tries to keep up his confidence by thinking of his baseball hero, feeling less lonely to recall that DiMaggio's father had also been a fisherman. Then he reflects: "Man is not much beside the great birds and beasts. Still I would rather be that beast down there in the darkness of the sea."

Everywhere are proofs of Eros and its antagonist death. While drawn through an island of Sargasso weed "that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket," Santiago catches and kills a beautiful dolphin which flaps "wildly in the air . . . in the acrobatics of its fear. . . ." As the duel continues through the second night, his conscience puzzles over these killings: "Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him." How many people will this marlin feed? he wonders. But, "There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity." Of these painful mysteries he can only tell himself: "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." When the old man manages to doze a little, though, he does not dream of killing; he dreams of a vast school of porpoises in their mating time and he dreams of lions as harmlessly playful as happy lambs.

By sunrise of the third day the marlin begins to circle. Santiago, though faint and dizzy, is able to pull the tiring marlin closer to his boat. Yet again the fish swims away:

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

So in this mortal battle, fish and man become one, killer and killed become one. Still, there is nothing here like the sickly caressing of the dead kudu in Green Hills of Africa. Rather, the context might remind us of Emerson's paradoxes in the poem "Brahma":

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep and pass, and turn again.

At last comes the chance, and Santiago drives the harpoon into the marlin's heart: "' I am a tired old man. But I have killed the fish which is my brother. . . .'"

When he lashes the great carcase to his skiff and begins the long trip back to land, Santiago believes his lacerated hands will heal quickly in the salt water:

The dark water of the true gulf is the greatest healer that there is. . . . With his mouth shut and his tail straight up we sail like brothers. Then his head started to become a little unclear and he thought, is he bringing me in or am I bringing him in?

An hour later the first shark hits: a giant Mako, "and everything about him was beautiful except his jaws. . . ." Santiago succeeds in putting his harpoon into the Mako's brain. This time he is pure killer, kills with hate; and we infer both the masochism and the sadism of this killing: "He hit it with his blood mushed hands driving a good harpoon with all his strength. He hit it without hope but with resolution and complete malignancy." But the shark has already succeeded in mutilating the marlin; and it is as if Santiago himself has been hit. He fights his despair: "'But man is not made for defeat,' he said. 'A man can be destroyed but not defeated.'"

Unquestionably, this is the explicit moral of The Old Man and the Sea. And yet Santiago has an after-thought: "I am sorry that I killed the fish, though." He says he has no "understanding" of sin, yet he wrestles with his conscience:

Perhaps it was a sin to kill the fish. I suppose it was even though I did it to keep me alive and feed many people. But then everything is a sin. Do not think about sin. It is much too late for that and there are people who are paid to do it. Let them think about it. You were born to be a fisherman as the fish was born to be a fish. San Pedro was a fisherman as was the father of the great DiMaggio.

Such reflections bring no comfort:

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?

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

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.

"I killed him in self-defense," the old man said aloud. "And I killed him well."

Besides, he thought, everything kills everything else in some way. Fishing kills me exactly as it keeps me alive.

Then Santiago undercuts these gloomy musings by reminding himself that it is the love of Manolin which also keeps him alive. Here is no mystique of death. This Hemingway hero is no self-destroyer, not death-obsessed. Santiago is philosophical, is thinking about death, not morbidly agonizing over it.

When more and still more sharks come—ugly, shovelnosed galanos —Santiago fights them off and kills them, with his oars, with a club, even with his tiller. By sunset, when they have eaten away half his trophy, he speaks to what is left of the marlin: "'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.'" He takes a baleful comfort in the thought that those who get killed have in their time been killers. By midnight more sharks come; then nothing is left of the marlin but the bones. Exhausted, and with "a strange . . . coppery taste" in his mouth, Santiago spits into the ocean. "'Eat that, galanos. And make a dream you have killed a man." He is "beaten now finally and without remedy." Somehow, he manages to sail his skiff and the great skeleton back to his home port. He is grateful that the boat is sound and the current is helping. "The wind is our friend, anyway, he thought. Then he added, sometimes. And the great sea with our friends and our enemies." He wants only bed and sleep. "It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was."

If we ask what are the meanings of the old man's experience, Hemingway himself has explained: "I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things." For symbol-searchers, this statement has sometimes provided carte blanche. No doubt certain things in The Old Man and the Sea are suggestive beyond literal fact. These deepen the spiritual resonances of the story, enhance it with overtones of meanings. Still, even those things in the story which are unquestionably symbolic are subordinated to the conventions of realistic fiction.

It is easy for close readers to point to analogies between Santiago and Christ. And yet only those with a penchant for seeking in literature support for their own religious convictions or yearnings will be satisfied with interpreting the story, in any doctrinal sense, as a Christian parable. As to the view that Santiago is, in Aristotelian terms, a tragic hero equipped with a tragic flaw and punished for hubris —this requires equal ingenuity, even more erudition; and it is less persuasive. For Santiago's case is at once too simple and too complex for either of these academic schemata.

The doctrinaire Christian interpretations of The Old Man and the Sea push us into certain awkwardnesses. Of course, we might compare Santiago's ordeal with a crucifixion. No doubt Hemingway plays upon our religious sensibilities when, with the coming of the shovelnosed sharks, the old fisherman utters the word "Ay"; and Hemingway comments, "There is no translation for this word, and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands into the wood." We know however, of worse sufferings, both in fiction and in life, which have never earned the word crucifixion. It is true that, when Santiago gets back to land he carries his mast on his shoulders as he climbs the hill to his shack. But a skiff's mast is not exactly cruciform. Once he falls down climbing his hill; the other times he merely sits down to rest. Christ, of course, is said to have fallen more frequently when he climbed Calvary. And Christ's worst agony was on the hill of Calvary; Santiago's worst occurs well before he climbed his hill. When the old man falls on his bed, he sleeps "face down on the newspapers with his arms straight out and the palms of his hands up." That uncomfortable position is evidence of his exhaustion. But the usual representation of Christ crucified shows his palms and face in the same direction.

Then, too, Santiago has been called a Christian for his virtues and for his religious faith. On more than one occasion he prays—as does nearly everybody in a great crisis. Only once, though, does praying make Santiago feel better in his heart. Hemingway does not give us a man here who relies upon his religion: Santiago hardly gets from his Christianity the sort of consolation a committed believer does. As to his Catholicism, it is accident rather than essence—as anyone with intimate understanding of that faith will recognize, or even anyone who has assimilated, say, the novels of Graham Greene. And only the parochial-minded will insist that Santiago's virtues are specifically Christian. Unquestionably, he is humble, compassionate, conscientious, patient, loving, and feels kinship with and reverence for living creatures. Such virtues, though, are by no means the exclusive teaching of Christianity. If at the end, Santiago's resignation may be called Christian, we must also admit that other religions and philosophies teach resignation, even renunciation, of this world.

Whether Santiago can be labelled a tragic hero in anything like an Aristotelian sense is a problem which arises when we speculate on the question the protagonist puts to himself: What defeated him? Does he err through being too much the individualist, going it alone, and going out too far? If so, that is because circumstances force him to.

Santiago declines the boy's offer to accompany him because he is considerate and not selfish. Since Manolin is a poor boy who is now with a lucky boat, it would not have been sensible for him to throw in his lot with a fisherman who has been making no catches. Santiago takes the risk of going far beyond the usual fishing grounds because, with such poor luck for eighty-four days, he must try something radical.

He sets out with no prideful individualism. The pride he takes in his strength and skill is a part of his healthy self-love, the normal pride any worker should take in worth while work. When the boy insists that Santiago is unique among the fishermen—"'there is only you'"—he is happy with the compliment; but he adds: "'I hope no fish will come along so great that he will prove us wrong.'" When Manolin expresses his faith in him: "'I may not be as strong as I think,' the old man said. 'But I know many tricks and I have resolution.'" He is never one who overestimates himself. Had he not correctly estimated his physical and moral strength, his venture would have been foolhardy at the outset.

Naturally in the heat of battle with the great marlin, Santiago's pride does grow. This, however, is scarcely the sort of over-weening pride which drives a man out of his place in the order of things, angering the gods and bringing on their punishment. Of the moment of the actual kill, Hemingway writes: "He took all his pain and what was left of his strength and his long gone pride and he put it against the fish's agony. . . ." Santiago feels no pride at the kill: "The old man felt faint and sick and he could not see well." Afterwards he is simply sorrowful: "I am a tired old man. But I have killed this fish which is my brother. . . ." He is not punished for pride. He suffers for two reasons: the lucky accident of hooking so extraordinary a fish; the consequences of going far out which increased the likelihood of sharks getting his trophy. The coming of bad luck with the sharks does not surprise Santiago. When he looks for a reason why he has lost, he can only say, "'I went out too far.'" That is all he knows. That is all we know. With good luck, he got his fish; with better luck he might have escaped the sharks. But he was not rebelliously challenging the nature of things. Nor does he glimpse, as the heroes of classic tragedy sometimes do, some fresh awareness of his own nature, some new insight into the workings of the universe. From the beginning, he knew himself well enough and he knew the law of kill-and-be-killed. His only lesson is that defeat is easier than he thought it might be.

This book, however, is not nihilistic nor deeply pessimistic. More than any of Hemingway's earlier works it reconciles us to our human condition. Compare it, for instance, with A Farewell to Arms, and we see the distance Hemingway has travelled. Lt. Henry thinks that the world "kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave. If you are none of these things you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." Santiago is very good, very gentle, very brave; but he has not been killed in a hurry. At the end he is asleep, dreaming of his happy lions, while the boy who loves him watches at his side. From the outset Santiago understands instinctively what Harry Morgan glimpsed only in his death agony: "No matter how a man alone ain't got no bloody fucking chance." Of Robert Jordan's solidarity with humanity certain questions nag us: for all his professor's intellect, Jordan's cause is verbalized in clichés, never quite dramatized in his experience. By contrast, the love which binds Santiago to nature and his fellow human beings is always realized. He is lonely but not isolated. He has not rejected the world nor cut himself off from his fellows.

Of the love realized in The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway makes plain enough its values. In effect, he tells us that there are persons like Santiago who have love in their hearts. He sees evidence of love also in the nonhuman world. Alive as the hero is to the love in himself and in nature, he is equally alive to the pain, the violence, the killing which are inescapable in the natural world. Though he is tormented that he, too, must bring pain and death, at least Santiago knows that the love he feels is somehow allied with the love in nature. Before the paradox of this fact Hemingway does not flinch. It is writ large in every ambiguity, in every ambivalence, of Santiago's adventure with the marlin. As a killer Santiago is a breed apart from all the earlier Hemingway killers. As to that pride in giving the god-like gift of death, Santiago is a world's distance away from the matadors of Death in the Afternoon.

More than anywhere else in his writings, Hemingway has succeeded here in expressing tenderness—without the tight lips, or the oblique implications. If he embarrassed us with love's tenderness in Across the River and into the Trees, that is because in Colonel Cantwell, Hemingway was too much entangled subjectively. By contrast, there is no such fumbling in the characterization of Santiago, and no false notes in his story—despite the aging Hemingway being something of a Santiago himself. He too had fished for big ones in the Gulf stream; and sharks had eaten away one of his own great catches. But he has never slipped into exploiting the legend of Papa the great sportsman.

Nevertheless, it is Hemingway's deeply personal involvement which gives this novelette a convincingness lacking—except in a few of the stories—in all his other writings since Winner Take Nothing. Here at last he has found—and found a way to realize in fiction—the warmth and tenderness and intimacy of love. A love which affords a reprieve against violence, pain, and death gives this story its poignancy. Part of Hemingway's success comes from his attitude toward his subject. It required the disciplined love of the artist to create a hero who, without too much self-love or self-hate, can still interest us.

To be sure, Santiago is not presented as a figure complexly involved in his society. Mostly we see him as a man alone with nature and man alone with himself. Not that his community is indifferent to Santiago or he independent of them. On his way back he reflects:

I hope no one has been too worried. There is only the boy to worry, of course. But I am sure he would have confidence. Many of the older fishermen will worry. Many of the others too, he thought. I live in a good town.

But Santiago is without a real home. His wife has been dead so long that, though he keeps a couple of religious remembrances of her, he no longer dreams or thinks of her. He has no woman, no family, no children. All his personal love is directed to the boy. And Manolin is another man's son.

Manolin's function is to heighten our sympathy for and increase our understanding of Santiago. The boy appears only at the beginning and at the end of the narrative. Of course, in the central drama, the catching of the marlin and the fighting against the sharks, he is of no practical help, though repeatedly Santiago wishes the boy were with him. Before the old man sets out, Manolin fetches him food and bait and helps him carry his gear. After the ordeal, Manolin is the first to see the old man, finding him asleep. His mangled hands make the boy cry, and he is not ashamed of other people seeing his tears. There is a special tenderness in Manolin's solicitude for Santiago, and it goes further than what we expect of affection between age and youth or the reciprocal love between master and apprentice. Manolin adores Santiago as the boy narrator of "My Old Man" adores his father. It is not only that he worries that Santiago may not eat enough or that he is so careful about the blanket when the old fisherman sleeps. For a boy scarcely in his teens, Manolin has astonishing tact when it comes to helping Santiago maintain certain little fictions to sustain the dignity of the elderly—like that about the cast net, which he knows has been sold, and the pot of yellow rice and fish, which he knows does not exist. One can scarcely question Philip Young's remark that Manolin, in his compassion, love, and admiration for Santiago, takes on something of the role which in the earlier fictions has been performed by passive heroines like Maria and Renata.

What complicates the figuration of a father-son relationship here is the fact that Manolin dislikes his own father and prefers Santiago. Beyond this, Hemingway offers no further explanations of the boy's unusual devotion to the old man. Possibly Hemingway had other reasons to put Manolin into his story, emotional reasons screened from his own consciousness. And perhaps here we can begin to understand some of the hidden depths of the power in this story. At least this much seems likely: Hemingway, himself an aging and fine fisherman, could identify with Santiago; at the same time he can identify with Manolin. So he was able, in his fantasy and in the guise of fiction, not only to recapture something of his own adult experiences but also to relive some of his own childhood. For is he not telling again the story of himself as a little boy, whose father was a big fine fisherman and gave him his first rod when he was three—the father whom the little boy adored and whose suicide later so disillusioned him? From the psychologist's point of view, we might remark that here Hemingway resolves his conflicts—at least insofar as he has made a work of art out of his own ambivalent feelings toward his father. So, the controlled sweetness and the hard-won serenity which please us in the art of The Old Man and the Sea are rooted in this reconciliation with the image of the father.

But in whatever affirmations we have here about love, Hemingway has still not been able to give us any affirmation about adult heterosexual love. It is as if, in his own testimonial, love between man and woman is impossible in our world in our time. Love does exist. But the only reliable personal love is homoerotic. Ideally, this is the love among males who are cut off from women, from family ties, from parental responsibilities, from the complications of society. It is hard to deny the relevance of Leslie Fiedler's thesis. True, Santiago is not wholly an isolated one. Yet mostly he is alone in the wilderness—the Gulf waters being, for Hemingway, all that was left of the American wilderness. Thus, in the tradition of American letters the old fisherman takes his place along with mythic figures like Natty Bumppo, an old trapper alone in the wilderness, dying among the Pawnees, loving Hard-Heart and loved by him as earlier he had loved Chingachgook of the Last of the Mohicans.