Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
A Big Fish and a Foolish Pride.
Lions hunt in packs.
Burton Weltman
School Days/School Daze: The wiseacre kid has a point.
A discussion of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is in progress in a class of high school sophomores. The teacher is discoursing on the meaning of the novelette. Most of the students are bored stiff, others are feverishly taking notes. This stuff may be on the test. One kid is lounging in the back of the room with his hand raised. The teacher is studiously ignoring him.
The Old Man and the Sea was first published in 1952. Over the years, it has become a widely assigned book in middle and high school literature classes. Itis a famous book and won a Pulitzer Prize. It was also cited when Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature shortly after its publication. It is a short and easy read, and it is full of potentially interesting things to discuss. Assigning the book is a way of connecting young adult readers with one of the great writers of the twentieth century without requiring too much effort from them.
The story is about the struggles of an old and impoverished fisherman from a small Cuban village. It seemingly takes place in 1949, as the old man, who is an avid baseball fan, mentions that Joe DiMaggio, the great New York Yankee outfielder, is injured with bone spurs, and DiMaggio suffered that injury in 1949. As the story opens, the old man has gone eighty-four days without catching a big fish and is being shunned by some of his neighbors as a purveyor of bad luck. The old man has apparently been a loner for most of his life, but has taken on a young assistant in recent years to help him fish in his old age. But now the parents of his assistant have banned the boy from fishing with him for fear the boy might catch the old man’s bad luck.
The book’s opening line is “He was an old man who fished alone,” thereby highlighting the old man’s isolation. The old man’s name is Santiago but the third person narrator of the story consistently refers to him as “the old man,” which also highlights his alienation. The old man fishes in a skiff, a small boat with oars and a sail. The boat can be handled by one person but the other fishermen in the book seem to go out in their skiffs in groups of two or three, as had the old man with his young assistant before his shunning. The old man is on his own and is desperate.
In his desperation to catch a big fish, the old man decides to sail farther out from the coast than he and the other fishermen have ever gone. After most of a day of frustration, he finally hooks a huge marlin but cannot bring in the fish all by himself. The marlin, hooked but still game and very strong, drags the skiff farther and farther away from the coast, with the old man hanging on for dear life. This goes on for three grueling days until the fish finally tires and the old man is able to kill it with a harpoon. The marlin is bigger than the old man’s boat so he has to tie it to the side of the skiff, leaving the fish to float in the water as they sail back to the shore in tandem.
The old man sets sail for home with what he celebrates as a glorious prize that will make him a lot of money and very famous. But, no sooner does he start for home than sharks begin to attack the fish. The old man furiously fights and kills many of the sharks, but it takes him a day to get back to shore and the marlin is completely devoured by sharks before he can get it home. He arrives with a huge fish skeleton attached to his boat, much to the marvel of the villagers, but with nothing to sell in the market.
In the course of landing the fish and then trying to bring it back home, the old man suffers enormously from the elements, lack of food and water, lack of sleep, and injuries he sustains while fighting first with the marlin and then with the sharks. The book contains extremely detailed descriptions of the sailing and fishing methods and the skills of the old man. Hemingway is adept at making a riveting and moving adventure story out of complicated technical information about sailing and fishing.
Hemingway is also able to describe well and with great empathy the suffering of the old man, whose mental and physical endurance are remarkable. But the old man suffers lapses in both. In the course of struggling to land the marlin, for example, the old man comes to regard the fish as simultaneously his brother and his nemesis, and he talks to the fish as though the fish is his companion. He sporadically realizes that he is becoming delusional, but can’t stop himself.
When the old man finally reaches home, he goes almost straight to sleep. And that is how the book ends, with the old man having a recurring dream about a group of lions he had apparently once seen on a beach in Africa when he was a young sailor working on commercial vessels. The last line is “The Old Man was dreaming about lions.” He loves those lions, and throughout the story he repeatedly thinks and dreams about them, and wonders “Why are they the main thing that is left?” in his memories of his life.[1]
The Old Man and the Sea tells a simple story, but that does not mean its interpretation should be simple. Immediately upon its publication, however, the book was saddled by influential reviewers with a simplistic interpretation describing it as a paean to heroic individualism. In this view, the old man triumphs over a hostile natural and social environment, bagging his fish even though he cannot bring it home. He is a winner in his solitary struggle for self-respect against nature and his fellow men. And the book holds his individualism up as a model for humanity.[2] This view has over the years become fixed as the conventional interpretation of the book.
A recent reviewer, for example, referring to the old man’s perseverance in fighting the marlin and the sharks, and to his reveries about lions, has characterized the old man as a dreamer. “A world without dreamers would be a nightmare,” this reviewer claims, and concludes that the moral of the story for readers is to persevere in their dreams, no matter what the obstacles or what other people say.[3]
Another recent reviewer similarly sees the moral of the story as “Heroism is possible in even the most mundane circumstances.” That is, even a lowly fisherman can be a hero and we, who are most likely mundane people, should take a lesson in heroism from the old man.[4] Placing a seal of establishment approval on this conventional interpretation, the Encyclopedia Britannica describes the book as a “heroic novel” about man proving himself through “overcoming the challenges of nature.” The encyclopedia concludes that the story illustrates “The ability of the human spirit to endure hardship and suffering in order to win.”[5]
The underlying theme of conventional interpretations of the book is that the old man is a winner in his struggles with the fish, his environment, his society, and himself, and he is extolled as a heroic model for us to emulate. This interpretation is the gist of the teacher’s discourse to the class.
When the teacher finishes, the student in the back is finally recognized by the teacher and the kid proceeds to proclaim that in his opinion the old man was an idiot who ended up with nothing, which is what was coming to him. The teacher coolly rejects the student’s claim, in a tone that suggests this is the sort of wiseacre comment one would expect from this kid. But is the kid wrong? I think not, and I think it matters.
Conventional Interpretations: Doing a disservice to our students.
I have two main objections to the conventional interpretation of The Old Man and the Sea. The first is that it confounds the differences between individualism and individuality. Individualism essentially consists of doing your own thing, of, by and for yourself, irrespective of any relation with others. Individuality essentially consists of finding your own voice and place within a group, and to make your own individual contribution to the collective effort. The conventional interpretation describes the moral of the story as promoting individualism, whereas I think it promotes individuality.
The second problem I have with the conventional interpretation is that it misconstrues the form of the book. There are many ways in which literary works can be characterized and categorized. One way, which dates back to Aristotle and the ancient Greeks, is to distinguish between melodramas, tragedies, and comedies. Melodrama can be described as a story of good against bad, good guys against bad guys, for example, or a good person battling against hostile circumstances.
Tragedy can be defined as a story of too much of a good thing becoming bad. Tragedy involves a character who pursues a too narrowly prescribed good too far until it turns on itself, becomes bad and precipitates disaster. The character’s tragic flaw is pride and a lack of perspective, the failure to see things in a broader context beyond his own narrow vision. Tragedy is a story of hubris versus humility, the failure of the tragic character to recognize his personal limits.
Comedy is generally defined as a story of wisdom versus folly, for example, wise people versus foolish people or a well-intentioned person doing something stupid. A comedy need not be funny. It is the stupidity of the fools that make it comic.[6]
The lines between melodrama, tragedy, and comedy are not hard and fast, and the story forms overlap in many respects. Each, for example, can contain elements of stupidity, conflict, violence, and pride, and each can have an unhappy ending. Too much of one element can transform one story form into another. Conventional interpretations describe The Old Man and the Sea as either a melodrama or a tragedy, or some combination of the two. I think it is better read as a comedy.
Following the conventional interpretation, educational websites devoted to guiding students and teachers toward understanding the book all take the view that the story promotes individualism and takes the form of a melodrama, tragedy or combination of the two. I think that this is a mistake and that it does a disservice to the story and to our students.
Typifying these academic helpmeets, the website Sparknotes.com describes the story in melodramatic terms as portraying “Heroism in struggle.” According to this website, the novel describes a kill-or-be-killed world in which each man must heroically fight for his livelihood and life. Pride may tragically lead a person to go too far, as it did when it led the old man to sail too far from shore, but pride is the “source of greatest determination” in men. Without pride, men are losers. The moral of the story, according to Sparknotes, is contained in a pep talk the old man gave to himself when he said that “Man is not made for defeat” and that a man may be “destroyed but not defeated.” Sparknotes concludes that the story teaches us that men must follow their pride and never admit defeat.[7]
In a similar blog addressedto school teachers and students entitled “What lessons we can learn from The Old Man and the Sea,” the writer claims the moral of the story is that “Perseverance is a universal law.” This blogger claims the book teaches us the virtues of individualism and going it alone. Focusing on the shunning of the old man by the villagers, the blog concludes that the lesson of the book is that each of us must individually fight our own battles no matter whether or not other people support us.[8] Study.com, another website for students and teachers, similarly claims that a combination of hope and pride may have led the old man to go too far in search of a fish, but the marlin symbolizes redemption for him even though he loses it.[9]
Many of these study guides for students and teachers focus on the old man’s preoccupation with lions. They invariably claim that this preoccupation symbolizes the heroic perseverance and individualism that the old man exhibits. Litcharts.com claims, for example, that the lions represent the “rejuvenation” of the old man and the return of his pride. Pride may be a tragic flaw, the website acknowledges, but it is a virtue as well as a vice because it spurs the hero to action. Symbolically, according to this website, “a group of lions is called a ‘pride.’”[10]
Shmoop.com, yet another website for persevering students, also claims that lions are persevering predators who symbolize the perseverance of the old man. The old man, this website insists, identifies with lions and they inspire his perseverance.[11] Finally, enotes.com, whose author advertises himself as “a certified educator,” claims that the lions represent the old man’s vitality and “his victory over village prejudice.” According to this educator, the lesson of the book for young students is to go their own ways no matter what others say.[12]
Echoing the conventional interpretation of the book, the common theme of all these educational websites is that the old man is a winner even though he ends up empty handed, seriously injured, and completely wiped out. And the websites all claim that the book promotes the old man’s actions as a model of individualistic heroism for readers of the book. I don’t agree. I think these educators have misread the book and missed the boat and, speaking as a former teacher and former professor of education, I think they are doing a disservice to students.
Prides Foolish, Tragic, and Leonine: Getting things straight.
Pace the conventional interpretation, I agree with the wiseacre kid’s take on the book. And I think his reaction reflects that of most students when they read it, which is that the old man is portrayed in the story as a fool. It was my reaction when I first read the book some sixty years ago. And I think the reaction of most people would be that the old man should not be fishing alone, should not have gone out as far from shore as he did, and should not have continued fighting the marlin and then the sharks, but should have cut loose the fish rather than fight him to the end and the sharks thereafter. And, most significantly, the old man acknowledges all of this in the course of the book.
The old man repeatedly mourns that he does not have someone else with him in the boat. “I wish I had the boy,” he recites over and over.[13] He frequently berates himself for having forgotten to bring some necessary piece of equipment. “You should have brought many things, he thought. But you did not bring them, old man.”[14] He admits in the end that he has been defeated and is a loser.[15] “They truly beat me,” he acknowledges.[16] And he blames his disastrous loss on his own foolish pride.[17] “You violated your luck when you went too far outside,” he complains to himself.[18] So, the wise guy reaction is the old man’s own reaction, and the conventional interpreters and teachers have got him wrong.
I think the book is best described in literary terms as a comedy since even the old man denominates himself a fool. That does not mean we are supposed to mock or reject the old man. He is someone with whom we are intended to identify and empathize based on our own sometimes foolish pride and risky inclinations, but he is not someone whose behavior we should emulate or promote as a role model for young people. Rather than a paean to individualism and individual heroism, the book is an argument against individualism and an argument in favor of cooperation. And the old man’s fixation on lions supports this conclusion.
Contrary to the way lions are mistakenly described in conventional interpretations of the book, lions are widely known for hunting in groups rather than alone, and for lacking stamina and perseverance. Lions are the only cats who live and hunt together in groups rather than individually. And it’s a good thing for them that they do because they have small hearts and lack stamina. They can run fifty miles per hour for a few hundred yards, but then they are finished and give up. If a gazelle gets a head start on a lion, it is home free. If lions didn’t help each other with hunting, by surrounding an animal so that it can’t get away, they would starve.
These are facts of leonine life that a big game hunter like Hemingway would surely have known, and these facts completely undermine the conventional interpretation of the lions in the book. It is also the case that a “pride” is a group of female lions, and it is the females who generally do the hunting for the larger group of male and female lions. A group of male lions is called a “coalition.” Using the word “pride” to characterize the old man is, therefore, not, as conventional interpretations claim, a macho masculine reference to male lions. In any case, the old man thinks and dreams of groups of lions who are playing together, not solitary individual lions. His preoccupation with lions seems, therefore, to be a dream in favor of collective life, not individualism.
The conventional interpretation also misreads the book in describing the story as a struggle of man against nature as though nature is the enemy of man and the old man must wage war against nature. But neither the narrator in the book nor the old man describes things in those terms. The old man and his fellow fishermen are, instead, portrayed as links in the natural chain, in the circle of life as it is popularly described in the musical “The Lion King.” Nature is the fishermen’s element, not their enemy.[19] When some of his neighbors shun the old man, they are essentially saying that he is a weak link in the chain and they don’t want him to break it for them altogether. They still care about him and take care of him, but they need to protect the community.
It is the old man who declares war against nature, not vice versa. When he decides to sail farther out than he naturally would, and then battles a fish and a pack of sharks that are too much for him, the old man undertakes an unnatural act. It is a proudful act that takes him out of the natural chain of things, as he later admits. In the natural chain, big fish catch and eat little fish, and people catch and eat big fish. That is in the nature of things. It is a struggle, but an ordinary course of business. The old man declared war on nature where none naturally existed.
The old man compounds this misstep by anthropomorphizing the marlin and characterizing their struggle as a battle of egos and wills. Speaking of the marlin, he says “I will show him what a man can do and what a man can endure.”[20] The old man treats the fish as though it is a self-conscious competitor, like Ahab chasing after Moby Dick, rather than merely a fish looking to eat other fish and survive. Speaking to the fish, the old man says “Fish, he said, I love and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before the day ends.”[21] Commenting on the unnatural implications of this statement, one reviewer has asked “Is killing what you love a tenable position?”[22] In his foolish pride, the old man has left even his human nature behind.
Another crucial mistake that conventional interpreters make is to take things the old man says in the midst of his difficulties as being the old man’s and the book’s final conclusions about things. When the old man says that a man can never be defeated and other proudful things in the course of his struggles, he is trying to egg himself on to keep up the fight. And it works. He fights his way through to the end of his Quixotic voyage, exhibiting a perseverance no lion could.
But then the old man reflects further on what he is doing and has done, and he comes to conclusions opposite to what he was saying before. Finally, he collapses and dreams of lions playing on the beach. Not a heroic ending and not a self-styled hero. Just a fisherman who foolishly got carried away with himself and with a fish. And in his last conversations with the boy before he nods off to sleep, he says that he is never going to do anything so foolish again.
The Moral of the Story and the Story of the Story.
I think the moral of the story of The Old Man and the Sea consists of a plea for cooperation, pragmatism and humility. The old man’s redemption is not in catching the fish as some conventional interpreters hold but in ultimately recognizing that he is a person who needs people, as the popular song goes. Not individualism but collectivism, and not pride but humility, is the moral. “I missed you,” the old man admits to the boy just before he falls asleep at the end.[23]
This moral is consistent with other of Hemingway’s writings, such as his most famous book For Whom the Bell Tolls. That book takes its title and its main theme from a poem by John Donne that asserts “no man is an island,” that all people are interconnected, and that one person’s life is everyone’s life, one person’s death everyone’s death. Hemingway is known for his macho heroes but like Robert Jordan, the hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls, they generally fight for the common good alongside common people. The old man learns this lesson in the book.
So, how could it be that The Old Man and the Sea has been so widely misinterpreted for so long? And how can it be that teachers routinely override a critical reading of the book by students so as to make studying the book an indoctrination in an individualistic ideology that the story doesn’t support? I think the original misinterpretation was a product of the times in which the book was first published, and it was then carried forward by intellectual and educational inertia.
The book was published in 1952, shortly after the United States had come out of the fight against totalitarian Nazism and fascism in World War II, and when the country was engaged in a burgeoning Cold War against the collectivist Soviet Union and Red Scare against domestic Communists. Fears of totalitarian collectivism and mindless conformity were widespread on both the anti-socialist political right and the anti-Communist political left. Concerns that the United States was becoming a mass society in which politicians, corporations and the mass media were promoting mind control and mediocrity for political and commercial ends pervaded the political spectrum.
These concerns were typified by the popularity among conservatives of Ayn Rand’s book (1943) and movie (1949) Fountainhead which extolled individualism and excoriated collectivism. Among liberals, The Lonely Crowd (1951) by David Reisman and others was a widely praised sociological study of conformity, focusing on the transition of Americans from being “inner-directed” by their consciences to being “other-directed” by the need to conform. Among socialists, The Authoritarian Personality (1950) by Theodor Adorno and others was a highly regarded sociological study of the susceptibility of people, and Americans in particular, to demagogues and dictators. On all sides of the literary political spectrum, intellectuals were looking to save the individual from being swallowed up in a mass society.
Bur there are significant political differences between individualism and individuality. Individuality is a pro-social attitude promoted by most liberals and socialists. Society for them is a caring community in the nature of a family. Individualism is an anti-social attitude promoted by most conservatives. Society for them is just a collection of individuals who are connected mainly by contracts. What happened with the interpretation of The Old Man and the Sea is just a small example of what happened to American culture during the Cold War. Conservatives grabbed the upper hand and individualism became pervasive throughout the culture.
The conventional interpretation of The Old Man and the Sea feeds into an anti-social conservative attitude which is not supported by the book. When he wrote the book, Hemingway was still a man of the 1930’s for whom the individual should operate within a cooperative context. He was still the author of For Whom the Bell Tolls. And that, I think, is what The Old Man and the Sea is about. “No man is an island” would be a fitting epigram for the book. Hemingway was promoting individuality in the book, not individualism.
Although the Cold War is long over, much of its cultural legacy lingers and this has consequences, as I think we see in the political and social conflicts occurring in the United States today. It is, therefore, long overdue to set the record straight about The Old Man and the Sea. It is about individuality, not individualism. The old man learns in the course of the book that he can be an individual without becoming an isolated individualist, and that he is part of a caring community. After he gets back from his multi-day ordeal, the old man asks the boy “Did they search for me,” as though he thought the community might not care if he was lost. The boy replies “Of course. With coast guard and with planes.” The old man seems gratified. He is a part of a community and the community cares about him.[24] This communalism in the story is generally lost in the conventional interpretation which itself gets lost in individualism.
As teachers, we need to promote the individuality of our students. They have to be able to think for themselves so as to better understand what is going on around them and, most important, recognize whom they can trust. We now live in an age of “fake news” in which the mass media, and especially the all-pervasive internet, are filled with false stories and false interpretations of anything and everything. The President of the United States has himself become our liar-in-chief and, amazingly, we cannot take as reliable truth a thing that the highest official in our country says. So, whom can we trust and how do we know we can trust them?
It has, therefore, become more important than ever for young people to learn how to think critically and not merely accept what someone tells them, not even their teachers. That is, I think, the moral of the moral of the story of The Old Man and the Sea.
BW 12/14/18
[1] Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner Classics, 1952. pp.20, 41, 48, 72.
[2] Robert Gorham Davis. “Books: Hemmingway’s Tragic Fisherman.” Archives.NYTimes.com 9/7/52.
[3] Russell Cunningham. “Books to give you hope: The Old Man and the Sea.” theguardian.com 8/24/16.
[4] James Topham. “The Old Man and the Sea, Review.” thought.com 3/17/18.
[5] Encyclopedia Britannica. “The Old Man and the Sea.” EncyclopediaBritannica.com 11/23/18.
[6] Aristotle. Poetics. New York: Hill & Wang, 1961. pp.59, 61, 81-86. Kenneth Burke. Attitudes Toward History. Boston: Beacon Press. 1961. pp 37, 39, 41. Paul Goodman. The Structure of Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.1954. pp.35, 82-100, 172.
[7] “The Old Man and the Sea.” Sparknotes.com 11/23/18.
[8] Matt Reimann. “What lessons we can learn from The Old Man and the Sea.” Blog.booktellyouwhy.com 10/1/15.
[9] Joe Ricker. “Symbolism of the marlin in The Old Man and the Sea.” Study.com Retrieved 12/7/18.
[10] “The Old Man and the Sea: Symbol Analysis.” litcharts.com Accessed 12/7/18.
[11]“The Old Man and the Sea: The Lions.” Shmoop.com 11/23/18.
[12] Belarfon. “What significance do the lions on the beach have in The Old Man and the Sea?” enotes.com/homework-help.
[13] Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner Classics, 1952. pp.30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 39, 49.
[14] Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner Classics, 1952. p.65.
[15] Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner Classics, 1952. p.69.
[16] Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner Classics, 1952. p.71.
[17] Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner Classics, 1952. p.62.
[18] Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner Classics, 1952. p.68.
[19] Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner Classics, 1952. pp.22, 27.
[20] Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner Classics, 1952. p.41.
[21] Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner Classics, 1952. p.34.
[22] Mary Eisenhart. “Book Review: The Old Man and the Sea.” commonsensemedia.org
[23] Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner Classics, 1952. p.72.
[24] Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner Classics, 1952. p.72.
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