I finished The Old Man and the Sea a while ago but never had the chance to write about it. The ending was sad, but realistic. As soon as the old man caught the fish, I immediately thought of all the blood spreading in the water, and knew the sharks would come just as surely as he knew. But I guess I always assume the worst, because I thought he would surely die coming back, and when he survived, even though the fish was destroyed, it was sort of a successful trip. But the definition of what was a successful trip changed during the journey. In the beginning the man let the fish pull him out without much worry, having plenty food and water and assuming the fish would soon tire and be caught. But as his water supply runs low and the fish stays strong, he begins to worry, but he never doubts his decision, and never thinks about going back. Turning back was all I could think about. From the moment he let the fish pull him out to sea, I was worried, but as he was an experienced fisherman, and I did not even know how big Cuba was, I trusted his judgment. I understand how once you start on something, and you’ve spent much time and energy on it, it would seem like such a waste of time and effort to stop when you have not finished. But in a case like this, alone in a small boat being pulled out to sea, old and weak, I would have cut my losses and turned back long before that thought even crossed the old man’s mind. But that is his nature as a fisherman, it is his living and he was determined, but also more than a little desperate to not come back empty-handed. I would have been more worried about coming back alive. But that is the nature of a fisherman; it is his whole life and purpose to catch fish. 

He overestimated his opponent, but even though the fish started out so much stronger, the old man was able to outlast it. It would seem as though the fish’s will to live was weaker than the man’s will to catch it, but that is basically his life. I think he felt that if he didn’t catch the fish he would not be able to survive, maybe not in the physical sense, but in some personal emotional sense. So his will was also to live, catching the fish is a crucial component to his life, and he felt that he could not live if he lost to the fish. The man’s will to live was more complex than pure survival, supposedly unlike the fish’s will, and his failure would lead to not only a physical death but also a worse emotional one. The man thinks a lot about wills, and who is stronger and more determined, and the man himself is not sure of the answer. Even after he has caught the fish, he wonders if it was all a dream, because the fish is so magnificent and enormous, and how did this weak old man bring him down. He wishes it had been a dream when the sharks come, and by the time he makes it back to the dock, it might as well have been. The fish is gone, only its skeleton remains, the only evidence of its magnificence, along with the old man’s injuries. 

At the end, the old man is in a state of defeat. His great accomplishment has been desecrated by the sharks, and both have destroyed him, physically and emotionally. But though he says he has run out of luck, as he lies on his mat, unable to get up, his very next sentence is planning the next outing with the boy, listing the new equipment he will need, and wanting the newspapers, presumably to discover the outcome on the baseball game. This is a fisherman. The old man has been out at sea for a week, battling the elements, an eighteen-foot fish, multiple sharks, and his own body’s failings, yet this does not set him back more than three days, and he is already preparing his next outing, because that is what a fisherman does. Just as the old man persevered on while the fish was pulling him at sea, so he perseveres through the repercussions of that act and continues on with his life, that is, with fishing. Another thing that stood out to me at the end of the novel was the sentence when the old man is explaining his injuries, and he says that he “felt something in my chest was broken”. This struck me as being metaphorical for his heart, and how it broke after he lost to the sharks, and lost his luckiness. 

Also at the very end, there are a couple of tourists looking down at the skeleton of the fish from a café, and think it is a shark. They remark that they didn’t realize how beautiful sharks were, when they misunderstand the waiter’s explanation of the type of fish. Their misunderstanding and ignorance angered me, because it was the sharks’ faults that this beautiful fish was floating in the ocean as “garbage”. Now I love sharks, but in this novel they are the obvious antagonists, destroying the fish and the old man. The old man loves the sharks as well, as he does all creatures of the sea, but that doesn’t mean he liked what they did to his fish, even if he understands why they did it. That the tourists would think that the beautiful thing was a shark, and not know that the sharks were actually what destroyed the beautiful thing, expresses their ignorance of such things, much like the ignorance of the reader at the beginning of the novel, not understanding the unique and intimate way of the fisherman. I feel like I still have so much that I could say about this novel, one idea can just go on forever, which I take as a sign of a great novel, so I might do another post later…