The protagonist of Hemingway’s famous fable is Santiago: an old, hardy fisherman from Havana. The desperation of Santiago’s situation is adequately outlined in the opening line: “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” Hemingway details the journey of Santiago as he sets out into the Gulf Stream on his 85th day without a catch. What then proceeds in the pages of this slim volume is the agonizing journey of Santiago and his relentless battle for three days and three nights. This is a battle with a giant marlin, multiple sharks, hunger, thirst, severe blisters, sleep deprivation, and declining mental stability. The Old Man and The Sea is an unrelenting ordeal, but it’s one that’s as hopeful as it is distressing.
Santiago is a dreamer. One consistent motif I noticed in The Old Man and The Sea is Santiago’s childhood memory of lions playing on an African beach in the evening. As Santiago’s dreams continually get battered and beaten down by his 85 catch drought and the other struggles accompanying the punishing life of the Gulf Stream fisherman, he continually returns to the childhood dream of lions on a beach in Africa. He dreams of lions before he leaves before the Gulf, he dreams of lions as the giant marlin drags him further away from the Cuban coast, and in the closing pages, as he rests back in Cuba after the majority of his catch had been eaten by sharks on his way back, he returns to his dreams: “Up the road, in his shack, the old man was sleeping again. He was still sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dreaming about lions.” The Old Man and The Sea tells a story of a dreamer, and it’s for this that I found it to be one of the most inspiring stories I’ve ever read. It’s the dreams, whatever they may be, that can bring people through the most punishing parts of life. After all, a world without dreamers is a nightmare.
The Old Man and The Sea is a concise and extraordinary piece of prose. It’s only 130 pages, and that’s with large font.
The book for next week is one I’ve wanted to read for quite a while, The Little Prince.