I have talked about things as we read and even recaptured the most meaty discussions on the class website, so if you need to check them out to help you know what to write, do so. You are smart people, and I am not going to hold your hand and tell you what you write. Tell me something interesting about what you have thought about this book so far, make yourself sound as intelligent as I think you are (among other things, that means use the spell check), and write at least 250 words.

Welcome to the world of the blog!

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• Original image: ‘Vaccum my beard‘  by: Kishore Nagarigari

Consider all stereotypes and characterizations that you know, and then form what you would consider to be the definitive character sketch of the American man.

We’ll continue to study Hemingway and his work, and then we’ll look back at your character sketches and see if you think they have been influenced by Hemingway’s work.

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Image Attribution:

Original image: ‘Cyrus Writing‘  by: Bryan Campen

Okay, so maybe that is partly true. And maybe that’s one person I do not want speaking at my retirement party. At least, I would hope that anyone reckoning my career would be more generous than some of my students are with the old man: A guy without a boat hung out with kids and tried to teach them to read and write better, but then he got eaten. End of story.

Obviously, I contend against this student’s estimation of The Old Man and the Sea, but that is no surprise. The book has risen to become one of the greatest in American literature, so to claim that so many people were dumb in liking it is mostly a teenage response and maybe a frustration with not understanding what all the hub-ub is about.

To be totally honest, I get huffy when someone complains about this book, but it’s not because I take the complaints personally. I do not need other people to like or enjoy what I like – their opinion is not why I grew to like The Old Man and the Sea. I get huffy because they dismiss this wonderful old man, Santiago, as a crazy loon, and I consider their easy write-off a personal knock on any wonderful and capable, if simple, old men. Or elder. Or person, including me. Which means, I suppose, that I do take their complaints personally.

I honor a class’s thinking process when they need to discuss whether the old man is crazy because he constantly contradicts himself and talks to himself:

“How do you feel fish?” he asked aloud. “I feel good and my left hand is better and I have food for a night and a day. Pull the boat, fish.”

He did not truly feel good because the pain from the cord across his back had almost passed pain and gone into a dullness that he mistrusted. (74)

Those are important aspects of the book and they need to be addressed, but I grow sad when my students cannot move beyond that issue, cannot connect with the idea of a perplexed and thinking mind: “‘I’ll rest on the next turn as he goes out,’ he said. ‘I feel much better. Then in two or three turns more I will have him’” (89). Have they never thought about something and attempted to make a decision? Have they never coached themselves through a difficult task? Have they never attempted to provide for themselves the source of encouragement they were not hearing from anywhere else? “I must get alongside him this time, he thought. I am not good for many more turns. Yes you are, he told himself. You’re good forever” (92). This old man talks to himself, but he does not sit in his shack going insane. He is an old man engaged in the most difficult struggle of his life all while longing for the companionship of his one remaining friend. To dismiss him is to write off ourselves when we pursue a difficult task.

And as I look back to this old man, I wonder about the difficulty of his task, and I ask myself whether I could have endured such suffering to obtain something, anything, that I wanted. As a reply, the words of one student resound deeply: “He probably did a lot better then what most of us would have done. I bet most of us would have said forget it. It’s just a fish.” What passion this man possessed, with only the fish to see it: “But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures” (66). When I think of his suffering, one image dominates my thinking. I realize he suffered in various ways through three days on the sea, but the part that I stick to, the part where the man’s endurance clearly outpaces what I think could be my own, is when the great marlin jumps from the water. Here lies Santiago, his cheek crushed into a slice of dolphin, unable to see the jumping marlin, only hearing “the breaking of the ocean and the heavy splash as he fell” (83), enduring the pain of the line on his hands, which were “cutting badly” (82), taking the strain willingly and patiently, because “he had always known this would happen” (83). No, I admit to myself when recounting such an event, I am no Santiago. I am not the archetypal quiet sufferer that Hemingway thrust before us as the American ideal of a man’s man. But as abused and unrealistic as that archetype may have become through the years, I still admire this old man, love him for his gentleness when he awoke the boy, taking “hold of one foot gently and [holding] it until the boy woke and turned and looked at him” (26) and for his humility as he lets the boy carry his things and buy him food.

The peak of suffering, of course, is his loss of the fish, but I cannot recognize the event as one of despair, because I have had the privilege of watching the old man work. There is beauty in this world in places where you are willing to find it, and the old man’s wit and skill as a fisherman, without, it seems at times, a single piece of helpful technology or convenience, grows to breath-taking levels. It can be no mistake that Santiago obsesses over the great DiMaggio, a man who played baseball with such grace and style that he made it look easy. Perhaps Willy Mays might have fit, but Hemingway chose the man whose father was a fisherman too. Calling this fishing DiMaggio-esque should be no exaggeration:

He could not see by the slant of the line that the fish was circling. It was too early for that. He just felt a faint slackening of the pressure of the line and he commenced to pull on it gently with his right hand. It tightened, as always, but just when he reached the point where it would break, line began to come in. He slipped his shoulders and head from under the line and began to pull in line steadily and gently. He used both of his hands in a swinging motion and tried to do the pulling as much as he could with his body and his legs. His old legs and shoulders pivoted with the swinging of the pulling. (86)

Such passages are surely part of why I read this book out-loud, for in reading it, I am determined to convey the beauty of every movement from this seasoned fisherman, a man who catches and slices a dolphin with one arm while steadily clinging to an 18-foot marlin with the other, a man who kills or severely injures more than five sharks in a desperate fight to save his glorious catch. By the time he begins to draw himself to the fish, I am so taken by his skill that I am more than rooting for him. It is not that I want him to catch the fish; he must catch the fish. Through his self-talk and contemplation about “this fish which is my brother” (95), he has convinced me that he and that fish are connected by more than pencil-thick fishing line. Somehow, I begin to think, this fish is a symbol of the greatness of the man and his connection with that sea.

And despite the destruction of the marlin and the failure to bring a fish that will feed a town, I admire the man no less. Neither does the boy, who recognizes that “He didn’t beat you. Not the fish” (124), even as he mourns with streams of tears the suffering the old man endured. I do not know that I can see this old man’s fate as anything but hopeful. He endured what no other fisherman would even attempt, accomplished something so great that it became impossible to complete. Is not that what I would hope to attempt with my life? Aren’t great things here on earth often ephemeral and fading? Does the passing of greatness diminish its value? Does being beaten negate the previous accomplishment?

I should not expect my students to see the old man the way I see him, but I want for them to see more of him; I want them to be able to look at their own lives, which can so easily be summarized the same way they summarize this book, and see something more. I would hate for them to see an act as great as the old man’s and misunderstand it like the tourists misunderstand the marlin, thinking not with wonder about a strange and wonderful old man and his astounding act of beauty, but with uninformed curiosity about a giant shark. Such uninformed curiosity, I notice, does not wonder about the old man. It probably sees him only as a poor man sleeping on a bed of springs in a shack by the beach.

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Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner, 1980.

Image Attribution:

Original image: ‘Klenovica blues or Todos los tonos del verde y del azul en un lugar de calma con barquito…‘ by: Paco CT

Original image: ‘Morning on Atitlan‘ by: Adam Baker

Original image: ‘Fishing At Dawn, Inle Lake, Burma‘ by: Taro Taylor

Original image: ‘Fisherman‘ by: Osvaldo Gago

Original image: ‘gölyazı‘ by: Hakan SERT

Original image: ‘Black and white portrait‘ by: Linda Cronin

1. Your initial reaction upon reaching the finish.
2. Questions that remain pressing for you, even as we’ve finished the story.
3. Symbols – What do you see in the book as symbolic or suggestive of something more?

Remember to link your article back to this one’s specific url (that’s the long url), and do not be afraid to reference another classmate’s observation if you think it’s a good one.

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Image Attribution:

Original image: ‘the great beast‘ by: Aaron Shumaker

• Why does the old man keep contradicting himself?
• How far from land is the old man?
• Will he make it back to land with the fish?
• Does he fear the sharks?
• Why would he leave the fish aside the boat knowing sharks would be coming? Couldn’t he find some way to get it aboard?
• Why does he only call the marlin “fish” if he has so much respect for it?
• Why does he not use better equipment or technology to fish?
• Why does he wish he’d never caught the fish?
• Why did he not pull the harpoon out of the mako shark?
• Why did he not bring some way to drain or blot up the blood?
• Does it matter whether it looks like the fish is pulling the skiff?
• What is the boy to him?
• Is the boy waiting for him at home?
• Why does he refer to the fish as his brother? But then, why did he hate the mako shark so much as he killed it?
• Why does he feel that killing the shark might be a sin?
• If the old man makes it back with no fish, will the boy believe him?
• Will the old man make it back alive?
• Is the old man truly going crazy?
• Why does the old man feel like he is a brother to the fish?
  • What about when he says he and the fish are one?
• Will the old man get to see the boy again?
• What will people think when they see that the old man has caught this fish?
• Why is he obsessed with bone spurs?
• After a fisherman catches the biggest fish he can catch, what then?
• Why is he questioning the moral consequences of catching the fish?
• Why can’t he cut the fish up before the sharks get him?
• Why does the old man want the fish?
• What is the old man going to do with a lot of money?
• Why does the old man argue with himself?
• Why does he always wish that he had the boy?
• Why does the old man relate himself to Dimaggio?
• What is the old man going to do if he loses the big fish?
• Why did he call tying up the fish slave work?
• Why did he use the harpoon rope to lash the fish to the skiff?

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Image Attribution:

Original image: ‘comin’ right at us‘ by: gina

Original image: ‘Pondi Coastline‘  by: Meena Kadri

Personally, I am always curious about the old man’s talk to himself. I attempt to track a pattern of what he says and what he thinks, to see if there is a discernible division, but I am at a loss to explain it adequately. Especially in this section, I wonder about his talking. Is he talking now to encourage himself? Or to fool himself? He asks the fish how he feels and then declares that “I feel good and my left hand is better.” And then in the next paragraph, we find out that “He did not truly feel good because the pain from the cord across his back had almost passed pain and gone into a dullness that he mistrusted” (74). In a sense, it is like he is playing the same game he played with the boy, pretending to have rice when he did not. But here, I wonder – will that hurt him or help him? Is it a character strength to encourage yourself of the strength you may have, even if your strength is questionable, or is it dangerous to deny the reality? I can’t say he’s denying the reality, as the text makes it clear he is aware of his weakness.

Maybe he is trying to appear strong only when he talks to the fish, as if he wants to appear stronger and more noble to the fish than he really is. Whatever the case, I haven’t decided completely yet. That will come later.

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Image Attribution:

Original image: ‘Black and white portrait‘ by: Linda Cronin

Finding symbols in literature is difficult, but I think you’re better at it than you realize. That is why I ask you to be alert for “potential symbols.” I don’t ask you to have it figured out – to know what the something greater is that they symbol stands for. I simply ask that you be attentive enough to recognize and identify something important. So in your blog today, tell me what you recognize as important – something you suspect might carry the weight of being a symbol. Quote from the book to make your article especially strong.

Also react to the section we read and consider reading what others are writing and commenting on (and linking to) their articles in your own. I’d like to see at least 10 sentences today.

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Image Attribution:

Original image: ‘drops of stars and stripes‘   by: Steve Wall

The line in this section that stands out to me concerns the marlins that stayed together after the old man and the boy had caught the female:

He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed. That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought. The boy was sad too and we begged her pardon and butchered her promptly (50).

I feel as though this line reveals a bit about the old man’s personality and how he relates to the things of the sea. He is emotional and considers the sea more of a colleague and friend than a thing. He considers the fish to have wisdom, and he hates and loves particular animals like a person would hate or love his neighbors. Interestingly, and perhaps intentionally, the old man is not depicted as having these opinions towards people. With them, he seems indifferent, not letting the fishermen who mock him bother him, and showing curiosity but not judgment. He is a man of the sea, moved by the things of the sea, and most comfortable on the sea.

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Image Attribution:

Original image: ‘Off the Forward Bow‘ By: Julie aka Piper Falk

Also within this article, please identify one line that stood out to you somehow. Copy it into your blog article and explain why that line particularly stood out. You can weave your line into your explanation of your reaction if you’d like.

As far as the blogging goes, though, please set apart the quote from the text (using that “indent” icon – it’s the seventh one from the left on your toolbar) and link back to this article. Make your reaction 7-10 sentences.

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Image Attribution:

Original image: ‘Buna‘  by: Merkur Nallbani