Santiago's Suffering

"A man can be destroyed but not defeated. ”(Santiago). Along the story Santiago was facing the fact that he had been running out of luck and was depending now on his skill and endurance. He is a queer old man, for he portrays courage, endurance and friendship throughout the story unlike many people around his age. Ernest Hemingway’s main characters always show this type of dignity and endurance when facing problems in an exemplar way, this he called the Hemingway Code.

Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.” (92) Through this quote we can still how kind hearted the old man is, yet it seems that he is about to lose another battle on his 84+ day journey without a success. Hemingway further applies biblical allusions to his work in order to incorporate the new testament and the lessons that can be learned from it. “The sharks provide a final classic image in the story.

The theme of treasure appears very early on in the story. Santiago, a travelling Shepherd, has a dream one night telling him that his treasure awaits him by the pyramids of Egypt. This dream sparks his journey where along the way, the people he meets and the experiences he has shape and transform his idea and perception of treasure. In the end, Santiago finds his physical treasure but his journey is not over as he had once feared. Santiago’s perception of treasure has transcended the physical and now he has respect for the treasure of home, knowledge and love.

Anold man is a nasty thing. " The same thing may have been said by the old man when he was young. One might evenconjecture that the old man chooses to be deaf rather than to face the nastiness of caducity and hear the words of disdainspoken by his juniors. Another tool used by Hemingway in this story is the image of Nothing. Nothing is what the old man wants to escape.

Endurance was shown through persevering through hard times without giving way. Endurance was present in The Old Man and the Sea through Santiago’s

Earlier this year I had to decide whether or not to tell my best friend some bad news that involved her. In the end, I decided to tell my friend the truth to help prevent her from making preventable mistakes. Santiago, unfortunately, is put into unlucky events which lead to his downfall. In the novella, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the choice of whether or not to tell people certain news can have a domino effect that can affect someone’s life. Characters that helped to save Santiago’s life made a conscious choice to protect him.

They begin discussing the old man’s attempt at suicide. The story which seems to start off about the old man really becomes about the fear the old waiter has of becoming like the old man. The importance of the characters, setting, and symbolism of the story all help Hemingway to express the hopelessness and loneliness of the old man and the older waiter. The story’s characters consist of the young waiter who is confident but seems to be a bit naïve about what life is really about.

The story The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway is about an old man who is looked down upon by the people in his village but rises above and keeps his optimism with the help of his friend Manolin. He goes on a journey to try and catch fish because so far he’s had an unlucky time trying to catch any. Along the way his courage, honor, perseverance, and optimism is put to the test as he faces difficult challenges. Santiago honored, or had a great respect, for Joe Dimaggio. Joe Dimaggio is a famous baseball player the Santiago has a high respect for because he feels he can relate to him.

(Hemingway, 1952, p.29). Santiago was brave enough to accept the unavoidable thing like death or his mind was ready to face any struggle but he was a man who refused to accept defeat. He prove himself as a determined man through killing his opponent marlin. His destruction over his enemy and shark shows a bravery and heroic qualities in him. He is even willing to sacrifice his own life to bring the marline at shore which shows that his bravery is stronger than any other thing.

The novel, The Old Man and the Sea, is a story about an old man, Santiago, who experienced great adversity but did not give up. The author, Ernest Hemingway, describes how an old man uses his experience, his endurance and his hopefulness to catch a huge marlin, the biggest fish he has ever caught in his life. The old man experienced social-emotional, physical, and mental adversity. However, despite the overwhelming challenges, he did not allow them to hold him back but instead continued to pursue his goal of catching a fish with determination. Santiago’s character, his actions and the event in the novel reveals an underlying theme that even when one is facing incredible struggles, one should persevere.

​Conclusively, Hemingway utilizes the internecine nature of Santiago and the marlin’s relationship to convey the value of internal growth through suffering in The Old Man and the Sea. The battle that Santiago and the marlin face is mutually harmful, but not equally destructive. Although the marlin is the epitome of an ideal opponent to Santiago, it is unable to escape death completely and is overcome in the final hour. His physical wounds act as a temporary reminder of his struggle, but his emotional wounds express the significance of his hardship and form impenetrable scars that fortify his being. Without the marlin and the close battle it perpetuated, Santiago would have never known the true value of scars or been given a greater appreciation

"... The fish gave a sudden lurch that pulled the old man... He felt the line carefully with his right hand and noticed his hand was bleeding" (Hemingway 127). This scene plays out from Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea on page 127 when Santiago and the Marlin are in a fierce, vicious, and expeditious battle. Ernest Hemingway devoted himself to writing fiction and eventually was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 (Scribner).

The Old Man and the Sea is about an old fisherman named Santiago. He hadn’t caught a fish for eighty-four days. But on his eighty-fifth day he hooked the fish of a lifetime. The fish felt indifferent to Santiago pulling on the line. After three days of fighting with the marlin he finally got it in.

In The Old Man and the Sea, the old man serves as an archetypal Hero throughout the book and experiences a daunting and life threatening task to catch a fish and end an 84 day drought. To begin with, the old man possesses all the necessary qualities to be characterized as the Hero. During the 84 day drought in which he went without a fish, he was still confident in his abilities and wouldn’t give up. He even took the chance of going farther out into sea than any other boat dared.

The Old Man’s struggles throughout the novel are predominantly Man versus Self and Man versus Nature, since his struggles are always against the seas, the Marlin and the sharks who begin to hunt him. Also, while he is traversing the seas for fish, his struggles with the pain he experiences are a large example of the Man vs Self