Hemingway’s philosophy in the novel The Old Man and the Sea.
One of the most famous writer Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is a philosophical novel. Santiago is the hero of The Old Man and the Sea who is an old fisherman in Cuba who, when we meet him at the beginning of the novel, has not caught any fish for eighty-four days. It is the story of his quest for the great catch that will save his career. Hemingway’s philosophy is that Santiago endures a great struggle with ¬¬¬an uncommonly large and noble marlin only to lose the fish entirely expect for its skeleton to rapacious shark on his way back to land. But despite the loss, Santiago is shown as having his spirit intact at the end of the novella.
Hemingway’s philosophy toward life in this novella is that man should continue to always strive for his goals. The basic idea of the never giving up on his dream was Santiago’s drive toward trying to bring the marlin. The entire first paragraph emphasises Santiago’s lack of success or luck: “It made the boy sad to see the old man came in each day with his skiff empty.” ( Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, www.Asiaing.com, page 1)
According to Hemingway, an artist, has to train and develop him self like sportsperson. Thus he says in The old Man and the Sea: “The sail was patched with flour sacks, it looked like the permanent defeat.”(Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, www.Asiaing.com, page 1) Santiago is a “strange”(Page 17) old man who has “fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream.”(Page 1) He is “thin and gaunt”(Page 1) with “deep wrinkles” ( Page 1) in back of his neck. This type of description of Santiago continues with details of his old worn body. Even his scars, legacies of past success, are “old as erosions in a fishless desert.”( Page 1) All this changes suddenly, though, when Hemingway says masterfully, “Everything about him was old expect his eyes and they were the same colour as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.”(Page1)
However, after eighty-four days Santiago is physically destroyed but mentally he is not defeated. Santiago’s courage and pride pushes him forward throughout the novel, even when it looks hope is lost, but is never defeated. Like Nelson Mendela Santiago is physically destroyed but as a real hero he can’t defeated. The brown blotches of the “benevolent skin cancer” (The Old Man and the Sea, Page 1) that the sun brings from its reflection on the topic sea are marked on his cheeks. the blotches run well down the sides of his face and his hands have “deep creased sears from handling heavy fish on the cords,”( Page 1) but none of these scars are fresh. But Santiago knows that struggle and suffering and manly endeavours must continue throughout life, and so we agree with him when he asserts : “Man is not made for defeat ..... A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”( Page 38) The oxymoron is realised as we read his story in the proper manner.
Hemingway draws a distinction between two different types of success: outer, material success, and inner, spiritual success. The colour of Santiago’s also foreshadows Hemingway’s increasingly explicit likening of his hero to the sea, suggesting an analogy between Santiago’s indomitable spirit and boundless strength of the sea. The novel shows that worthiness and being heroic and manly are not merely qualities of character which one possess or does not.
Santiago is not only old but he is alone at sea. Manolin is the only friend he has, but Manolin is restrained from going out to the sea with him not because he doubts the old man’s ability as a fisherman but because his parents not let him go with Santiago as they consider Santiago “definitely and finally salao,”( Page 1) which is the worst from of unlucky. But the boy loves Santiago and has faith in him. Santiago has taught him to fish and Manolin knows that Santiago is “the best fisherman.”( Page 7) Like a fine bull-figure, Santiago is methodical, patient, alert and unshakably determined. In Santiago, the will is indomitable. He has delicate but definite notions of personal value, honour and excellence, which set him apart from others, and his private mythology of perfection drives him far out into the sea in search of the unique and single experience that would lead him to the vindication of his ability. Santiago has a greater degree of awareness of the self, so by willingly and consciously choosing he avoids the folly of such surrender and moulds his own reality. But it is not enough to have the will to experience : one must also have the technique. If will is what enables one to live, technique is what enables one to live successfully.
Hemingway himself sought to perfect his art and the kind of technique that he endorsed can be seen in Romeo in The Sun Also Rises and later in the old fisherman Santiago of The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway is endows with a professional expertise. Which makes Jackson J. Benson term him as “the complete professional.”( Hemingway, Ernest, The Old Man and the Sea, (ed) K. T. Jones, Twentieth Century interpretations of the Old - a collection of critical essay, 1968).
The hero must first understand life, Segregate what is important to him and then live with an enthusiasm for that which is important to him. However the artist faces a blank page, the hero on the other hand has to face those elements and forces of nature that undermines man’s struggle. This destructive forces of nature that undermines man’s struggle. Hemingway personifies this forces by frequently using the pronoun “they”( Page 2) to refer to it and thereby moving it as enemy that the hero must face. Evidence can be found in A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway is trying to tell the reader to keep fighting. Santiago is instinctively made to carry on a desperate struggle against the sea. He is loath to give way and acknowledge defeat. He fights first to catch the fish and afterwards to kill the sharks. Fighting is his destiny. He is a man of manly spirit. Yet in the struggle to survive, this human must often suffer and even destroy the very thing he dreams of. Thus Santiago cuts his hands badly and loses the fish to sharks in the process of trying to get his catch back to shore. Yet the struggle to achieve one’s dreams is still worthwhile, for without dreams, a human remains a more physical presence in the universe, with no creative or spiritual dimension.
In his ordeal, Santiago has been compared to Christ. When he utters the cry for which there is no translation in words and it is similar to what a man might say when a nail goes through the human hand into the wood, the allusion is clear. Again, when Santiago goes up the shake with his mast on his shoulder it bears close resemblance to Christ going up the hill of cavalry. By comparing a simile and unsophisticated fisherman with a great mythological figure, Christ, Hemingway has demonstrated that it is possible to attain greatness even through one may be nullity in the social scale.
To sum up Santiago as a hero is superb. He is the most representative of modern heroes in literature. In creating such a character, Hemingway has declared his belief in human dignity and valiant fight against odds in life, and key of his triumph against is “….. man is not made for defeat …. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”( Page 38) So we can say that Hemingway’s all philosophy is based on human struggle as we can found in A Farewell to Arms which is based on the Spanish Civil war.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. www.Asiaing.com, Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, (ed) Charlie Shribner And To Max Perkins, 1952
2. Hemingway, Ernest, The Old Man and the Sea, (ed) A. Bhattacharya, Ababil Books, Kolkata, 2018
3. www.Jstor.Com, The Old Man and the Sea urchin genome; Theory and data work, 2011
4. Hemingway, Ernest, The Old Man and the Sea, (ed) L. Gurko, Ernest Hemingway and the Pursuit of Heroism, 1968
5. Hemingway, Ernest, The Old Man and the Sea, (ed) K. T. Jones, Twentieth Century interpretations of the Old - a collection of critical essay, 1968
6. www.academic.Oup.Com, The experience of Old age as depicted in contemporary novels, (ed) M. Sohngem, 1977
Written by Sourav Das ( Howrah, West Bengal,India)
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