compose a nine-paragraph essay about the old man and the sea

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I need some part of my essay at tomorrow. But I only need the whole work at may 14th.

For this assignment, you’ll get some practice explaining and responding to critical points from three critical reviews. To do so, compose a nine-paragraph essay that introduces and responds to three critical reviews of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

As always, begin with some history and background—this time about the book The Old Man and the Sea. Give a little history about the book, then briefly summarize its plot. After that, transition toward a thesis statement that closes your introduction, one that comments on both a) the critics’ general view of the book and b) your response to them.

In the body of your essay, provide two paragraphs for each of the three critical reviews. In each case, introduce the critic and quote their claim, then provide evidence from the book to support that claim. That’s the first paragraph. In the second paragraph, lay out your position in response to the critic, then provide evidence from the book to support your claim. Summarize, paraphrase and quote correctly. Blend short quotes into your general summary of the example. Avoid floating quotes. Keep your verb tense consistent throughout the body paragraphs. Cite correctly.

To begin your conclusion, restate your thesis. Then provide a transition from that restated thesis to a discussion of the future—a future that somehow relates to the book.

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COA Spring 18 Module 15 - Rubin Here’s the final essay assignment. Please read the entire document. To: From: Date: Re: English 1A Students Online Jay Rubin 7 May 2018 Final Essay The Old Man & The Critics For this assignment, you’ll get some practice explaining and responding to critical points from three critical reviews. To do so, compose a nine-paragraph essay that introduces and responds to three critical reviews of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. As always, begin with some history and background—this time about the book The Old Man and the Sea. Give a little history about the book, then briefly summarize its plot. After that, transition toward a thesis statement that closes your introduction, one that comments on both a) the critics’ general view of the book and b) your response to them. In the body of your essay, provide two paragraphs for each of the three critical reviews. In each case, introduce the critic and quote their claim, then provide evidence from the book to support that claim. That’s the first paragraph. In the second paragraph, lay out your position in response to the critic, then provide evidence from the book to support your claim. Summarize, paraphrase and quote correctly. Blend short quotes into your general summary of the example. Avoid floating quotes. Keep your verb tense consistent throughout the body paragraphs. Cite correctly. To begin your conclusion, restate your thesis. Then provide a transition from that restated thesis to a discussion of the future—a future that somehow relates to the book. Follow these guidelines:                    Single-space the memo essay. Set your margins for 1.13”. Do not indent memo paragraphs; separate them with one single space. Paragraphs must run between 8-9 lines each. Include a clear thesis statement at the end of the intro (1 full line max). Include a clear restated thesis at the start of the conclusion (1 line across max). Underline both theses for easy identification. Begin each paragraph with a clear and simple topic sentence (1 line across max). When introducing a review, correctly list the critic’s name and their critical point. Include in each body paragraph at least one short blended quote from the book. All quotes must be clearly and correctly cited. Do not title your memo essay Do not use any form of the word you— not even in a quote. Do not use verbs in command/imperative form. Use 12-point Times New Roman font. Edit & revise carefully—Proofread! Include a single-spaced memo heading at the top of your essay. Skip two single spaces after the memo heading; omit a title. Follow all memo guidelines as explained in the class syllabus. Due Dates The final draft is due on Tuesday, May 15. Now that you’ve read the instructions, let’s go over them in detail: To: From: Date: Re: English 1A Students Online Jay Rubin 7 May 2018 Final Essay First, when it comes to the memo heading, be sure to tap the “Tab” key after typing the colons after To, From, Date and Re. That’ll line up everything else. Also, put “1A Online” after your name—though without the quotation marks. It’s always a good idea to identify your class (and class time, too, if requested) in case your homework gets separated from the others in your class. And finally, always put the due date—not the date you do it. The Old Man & The Critics Notice how I’ve italicized The Old Man in the title above. Major titles, even abbreviated versions, always go in italics. Minor titles, such as the title of a critical review, always go in quotation marks. For this assignment, you’ll get some practice explaining and responding to critical points from three critical reviews. To do so, compose a nine-paragraph essay that introduces and responds to three critical reviews of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Note that the point of this essay is to introduce The Old Man and the Sea and then to respond to three critical reviews. You can use the three critical reviews I’ve posted to Canvas. If you prefer, you can use any of the reviews you submitted for your research homework—providing, of course, those reviews were approved. Use the reviews I’ve posted as a default. Email me if you have questions about any of your reviews. As for the nine paragraphs: The introduction will be two paragraphs, the body will be six paragraphs, and the conclusion will be one paragraph. As always, begin with some history and background—this time about the book The Old Man and the Sea. Give a little history about the book, then briefly summarize its plot. After that, transition toward a thesis statement that closes your introduction, one that comments on both a) the critics’ general view of the book and b) your response to them. The introduction for this essay will be two paragraphs long. The first paragraph will introduce the book; the second paragraph will summarize the book’s plot. When introducing the book, touch on its history: Consider Hemingway’s life and career in the 1950s and what the book and its subsequent awards may have meant for him. When summarizing the plot, tell the whole story in 7-8 lines. Leave that final line for your thesis statement. For your thesis, you’ll need to do a bit of induction. You’ll have to read and consider the three critical reviews, determine a critical point from each, and then draw some (i.e., synthesize) sort of conclusion about them. For instance, if the critics all liked a certain aspect of the book, say so; then add your response to them: Do you agree or disagree with them? Sample theses might be: o o Three critics appreciated Santiago’s focus on pasta, and so did I. Two of three critics disliked the book’s gastric theme, yet I enjoyed that aspect. In the body of your essay, provide two paragraphs for each of three critical reviews. In each case, introduce the critic and quote their claim, then provide evidence from the book to support that claim. That’s the first paragraph. In the second paragraph, lay out your position in response to the critic, then provide evidence from the book to support your claim. Summarize, paraphrase and quote correctly. Blend short quotes into your general summary of the example. Avoid floating quotes. Keep your verb tense consistent throughout the body paragraphs. Cite correctly. In each case, for each review, you’ll have two body paragraphs. In the first paragraph, you’ll need three things: a topic sentence, a reference from the review, and a supporting example from the book. First, for the topic sentence, identify the critic by name, if possible; by publication source, if not. Also, briefly lay out that critic’s main point about the book. Samples might be: o o Critic Bob Brown viewed Santiago as one cool dude. One SF Chronicle critic pointed out Santiago’s avuncular relationship with the boy. Keep the topic sentence relatively short, no longer than one line across the page. Then, to complete the first half of that first paragraph, expand on the critic’s point as expressed in the review. To do so, you’ll summarize the critic’s overall main point, blending in a quoted snippet from the review. You’ll have to cite the review by paragraph number since you probably will not have page numbers. Do so like this: (¶ 5). You can find the ¶ symbol by clicking on INSERT, then clicking on SYMBOL. You should find the ¶ on the list. That’s the first half of the first paragraph. For the second half of the first paragraph, transition toward a discussion of evidence from the book. If the critical review points out how Santiago was a cool dude, the critic most likely gave an example in the review. If so, you can use that same example to complete your paragraph. Just summarize the example in your own words, blending in a quoted snippet from the book. Be sure you cite the page number from the book. If the critic did not provide an example from the book, you should be able to find an example on your own. Remember: If you mention Hemingway when you begin referencing The Old Man and the Sea, you will only need to include a page number when citing: e.g., (5). If you do not mention Hemingway when you begin referencing the book, you will need to include his last name in the citation: e.g., (Hemingway 5). Best to include Hemingway’s name when you shift your focus to the book. The structure of that first paragraph looks like this: First Body Paragraph Topic sentence with critical point and author or publication name.    Introduce and summarize main point from critical review. Blend in a quoted snippet from the review, citing correctly. Keep this portion 3.5-4 lines long.    Transition toward a discussion of the book, mentioning Hemingway Summarize the example that proves the critic’s point (3.5-4 lines). Blend a quoted snippet from the book into that summary. For the second paragraph, begin by stating in the topic sentence your response to the critical point. If you agree with the critic, simply say so. If you disagree, also say so. After that, if you agree with the critic, find at least one new example from another part of the book that proves the critic’s point. Summarize that example, blending in a quoted snippet; then, cite it correctly by page number from the book. You can use the whole paragraph to summarize and discuss that one example. Or you can split the paragraph evenly and discuss two examples. The second example, however, must be from a different part of the book than the other two examples. If you disagree with the critic, find at least one example from the book that contradicts the critic’s point. Summarize that example, blending in a quoted snippet; then, cite it correctly by page number from the book. You can use the whole paragraph to summarize and discuss that one example. Or you can split the paragraph evenly in two and discuss two examples. The second example, however, must be from a different part of the book than your first supporting example. Be sure to cite the example(s) correctly. Again, mention Hemingway at the start of your discussion in this paragraph so that you can omit his name from the parenthetical citation. The structure of that second paragraph looks like this: Second Body Paragraph Topic sentence with your response to the critical point.    Summarize an example from the book that supports your position. Blend in at least one quoted snippet from the book, citing correctly. Use all 7-8 remaining lines to expand and explain this support, or... ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Shift to another example from the book that supports your point Summarize the example, blending in a quoted snippet from the book. Summarize both examples in 3.5-4 lines each. Review the Quoting Lesson in Module 8B to reacquaint yourself with how to blend snippets into your overall summary examples. Also, be sure to avoid floating quotes, which are relatively long quotes (sometimes short quotes, too) that are simply dropped into your paragraphs, often with only a signal phrase attached. Better to blend in snippets from the original text. And finally, be sure to keep your verb tense consistent. You might want to put everything in the past tense for consistency. To begin your conclusion, restate your thesis. Then provide a transition from that restated thesis to a discussion of the future—a future that somehow relates to the book. Follow these guidelines: When restating your thesis, you must rephrase your main point. If we said Hemingway was “dedicated” in the thesis statement, we might describe him as “devoted” in the restated thesis. Do not simply change one word, though, keeping the rest of the restated thesis the exact same as the thesis. The idea here is to rephrase, or even paraphrase, the thesis while still maintaining the same idea. After restating your thesis, transition to your final discussion of the future. While the future must somehow relate to the book, it doesn’t have to be about the book itself. It can be about the point of your thesis, for example. Say the main point of your essay is about the joy of sport fishing. Perhaps, in your conclusion, you might discuss how Santiago’s example might inspire a new fad for big-game fishing off the coast of Cuba. Just keep the focus on the future—“a future that somehow relates to the book.”  Single-space the memo essay. Be sure to check your paragraph format. Set the spacing before and after a paragraph at 0”. Then, when drafting, after each paragraph, you can simple add one blank single space. Make sure your line spacing is set at “single,” not “multiple” or “exactly.”  Set your margins for 1.13”. When I open your file, the first thing I’ll check is whether your margins are set for 1.13”.  Do not indent memo paragraphs; separate them with one single space. Also, be sure not to justify your right margin—that is, keep the right margin jagged, not flush to the margin as we do on the left.  Paragraphs must run between 8-9 lines each. The topic sentence of each paragraph will run no longer than the first full line. After that, you’ve got 7-8 lines to support that topic sentence. If you split a paragraph with two functions or two pieces of information, balance those aspects evenly. Do not, for example, spend six lines developing one example, then casually toss in another 1-line example. If you bring something up, you must discuss how it applies and supports your position.  Include a clear thesis statement at the end of the intro (1 full line max). Your thesis statement will come at the end of the second introductory paragraph, right after your summary of the novel’s plot. Keep the thesis short. Simply mention the critics’ points collectively, then add your position in response. Your thesis might begin on one line and continue to the next, but don’t let your thesis on the second line run past the point where it begins on the first line.  Include a clear restated thesis at the start of the conclusion (1 line across max). As stated above, be sure that you do not simply repeat your thesis. The point here is to give your reader another way to consider and understand your main point. Remember that this restated thesis is also a topic sentence, so limit it to one line across the page.  Underline both theses for easy identification. Let me stress that underlining theses is not necessary in most case. I ask you to do so to help me easily identify where you’ve placed the theses, to see if you are following directions. In the future, when you’re asked to write a paper for a class, do not feel obliged to underline the theses statements. Odds are no one will ever ask you to do that again.  Begin each paragraph with a clear and simple topic sentence (1 line across max). Keep them simple and keep them short. Never quote anything in a topic sentence. Just lay out the main point and leave quoting for the rest of the paragraph.  When introducing a review, correctly list the critic’s name and their critical point. In the first of each pair of body paragraphs, when you introduce the critical point from one of the reviews, you must identify the source of that critical point. If you know the author’s name, be sure to provide it in the topic sentence. If no author is credited, be sure to at least mention the place of publication, such as Newsweek. In this case, also include the title of the review in the first supporting sentence. If you don’t include the title of the review, you’ll have to include the first main word from the title in quotation marks in your parenthetical citation. For example, if the article was titled “The Best of Hemingway,” your citation would be (“Best” 5). In any event, be sure to limit the topic sentence to one line max across the page.  Include in each body paragraph at least one short blended quote from the book. This essay will be your last chance to demonstrate that you understand the concept of blending short quoted snippets into your own sentences. Avoid both long and floating quotes. Blend in short phrases, and be sure to place parenthetical citations at the end of a clause or the end of a section that summarizes your example. A citation suggests that whatever comes immediately before it was from a particular part of an outside source.  All quotes must be clearly and correctly cited. Again, this will be your last chance to demonstrate that you have gained this skill.  Do not title your memo essay Just skip two single spaces after the memo heading and begin your first paragraph.  Do not use any form of the word you – not even in a quote. This may sound like a picky restriction, but it serves two purposes: The first is that, in academic writing, we typically avoid the use of the second person you. Writers may refer to themselves in the first person, using the pronouns I and me. But most academic writing is in the third person, using the pronouns he and she and him and her. So this restriction helps accustom you to academic writing. Also, by directing you not to use the word you, not even in a quote, I can see how well you edit and revise your work. If there are lots of yous in your essay, it’s obvious that you skimped on revision—or that you just won’t follow instructions. Either way, it’s an easy ding; so edit and revise carefully to eliminate all forms of you. As far as quoting goes, eliminating you will help you practice paraphrasing and blending snippets into your own sentences.  Do not use verbs in command/imperative form. Commands/imperatives are just more subtle ways of using you. In these cases, the you is left out. Saying “Sit down!” is really saying “You, sit down!” Commands are always made to the second person. Therefore, avoiding them helps avoid direct references to the reader.   Use 12-point Times New Roman font. Edit & revise carefully – Proofread! Be sure to review your past memo essays, especially the ones that I have marked, and review your surface errors—that is, punctuation, grammar and spelling. You’ll want to avoid those same errors in this final essay so that you can demonstrate you’ve gained the skill to recognize and correct them.  Include a single-spaced memo heading at the top of your essay. Be sure to hit the Tab key after you type the initial colons.  Skip two single spaces after the memo heading; omit a title. Notice that you are now asked to skip two spaces after the memo heading, so please do so. All too often, students skip over these little details, which wind up costing points off their grades. Skipping them suggests to the reader that you either read too fast or do not consider details important. That undermines your ethos. And again, no title for this essay.  Follow all memo guidelines as explained in the class syllabus. Due Dates The final draft is on Tuesday, May 15. Again: This is your last chance to demonstrate all you’ve learned. Be sure to manage your time while writing this essay, and be sure to edit and revise thoroughly. Go for it! PS: I forgot to mention Include a Bibliography Include a bibliography on its own page at the end of your essay. Follow all the format guidelines explained in Module 13. Include on your bibliography: the novel, the three critical reviews I provided, plus any critical review that you use from your Module 12 research. There will be at least four items on that bibliography, as many as seven. Early Draft Due on Thursday, May 10: Read Carefully. In order to discourage you from starting your essay at the last minute, an early draft of this essay, if only a Bangout draft, will be due on Thursday, May 10. This draft does not have to be perfect, yet it should be fleshed out. That means the paragraphs must all be at least 12 lines each. This will allow you to tighten up your paragraphs as you revise. Date this draft as 10 May 2018. Have Fun! Saturday Review September 6, 1952 (pp 10-11) The Marvel Who Must Die* Carlos Baker The admirable Santiago, Hemingway’s ancient mariner and protagonist of this triumphant short novel, enters the gallery of permanent heroes effortlessly, as if he had belonged there from the beginning. Indeed he has. His story belongs as much in our time as that of Nick Adams. He is one of the men without women, fighting it out alone with only a brave heart for company. He is one of the winners who takes nothing. Though he does not die, he is one of those for whom the bell tolls. What Santiago has at the close of his story is what all the heroes of Hemingway have had—the proud, quiet knowledge of having fought the fight, of having lasted it out, of having done a great thing to the bitter end of human strength. Santiago, in the sum of things, is a tragic hero. His story, architectonically speaking, shows a natural tragic pattern. After eighty-four days without a strike, the old man rises in the cool dark morning and rows out alone towards the mile-deep Gulf Stream. It is the month of September, the time of the big fish. Toward noon of this eighty-fifth day, trolling his baits at various levels, he hooks a huge marlin down in the green dark of a hundred fathoms. Then, through that long afternoon, and the night, and another day and another night, he hangs on with the line over his shoulder while his skiff is towed slowly north-eastward through the calm September sea. Living on strips of raw bonito, a flying fish, and part of a dolphin, washed down with nips from his water-bottle, Santiago takes and endures almost infinite pains. Twice the fish leaps clear of the water, trying to throw the hook. But it is not until noon of the third day out that Santiago manages to bring his great trophy finally to the surface and to drive his harpoon into that other fighting heart. The marlin is two feet longer than the skiff, too big to hoist aboard even if the old man’s strength were still equal to the task. He lashes it alongside, comes about, and sets his patched old sail for home. An hour later, the first shark comes. The tragedy of subtraction begins. Number one is a handsome Mako, big and voracious, with eight ranking rows of teeth. Santiago kills him with the harpoon, which is lost when the Mako sinks. Also lost, like a piece of the courageous old man’s heart, is a great forty-pound bite from the side of the prize fish. What is worse, the scent of its blood spreads through the water like a lure for all the sea’s rapacious attackers. Two more presently close in—ugly, shovel-nosed Galanos sharks, rending and tearing what the old man has earned by the sweat of his brow, the blood of his hands, and the indomitable pride of his endurance. Like the first, these are killed. But others follow: one, then a pair, and finally in the night a whole anonymous pack. Santiago fights them off with all his has (his knife lashed to an oar-butt, the boat’s club, the tiller) until these break or are lost and there are no more weapons. Yet now there is no more trophy, either. If the old man were to look overside in the dark, he would see only the bony head, the proud perpendicular tail, and the picked white skeleton of his prize. The old man does not bother to look. He knows too well what has happened. Once more, in his lengthening career as one of the few genuine tragic writers of modern times, Hemingway has memorably engaged a theme familiar to tragic literature. Santiago belongs among all those who have the strength and dignity to fight against great odds and to win moral victories even though the tangible rewards may be lost in the process of the battle. On the heroic level, one thinks of Melville’s Ahab, Whitman’s Columbus, Sandburg’s Lincoln. But the great skill here has been to take a simple fisherman and—by setting his struggle against the background of the ancient and unchanging sea, and pitting him against an adversary worthy of his strength—bring out his native ability and indomitability until, once having known him, we can never afterwards lose sight of him. Wordsworth’s Michael and his leechgatherer are pastoral types, artfully projected against the English hills and plains, showing the resolution and independence which always tugged at Wordsworth’s heartstrings, as Santiago’s tug at ours. Yet the pitch here attained and held to is several degrees above the plane of pastoral tragedy. It approaches, as a tragic pattern, the story of King Lear, whose shark-hearted daughters bled him of his dominions and his hundred knights, yet left his dignity unimpaired and his native courage unshaken. “I will show him what a man can do,” says Santiago of his marlin, “and what a man endures.” The thousand times he has proved his worth before mean nothing. Now, climactically, he is proving it again, earning nothing more tangible than our sympathy and admiration. “One cannot hope to explain,” says the publisher’s commentary, “why the reading of this book is so profound an experience.” Once can, however, at least begin to explain the essence of the experience by making two related observations about it. The first is that the story not only shows a natural tragic pattern (which is no doubt why Hemingway was drawn to it); it develops also as a kind of natural parable. Like human life, for which it easily stands as an extended image, the struggle commences, grows, and subsides between one sleep and another. The parable of Santiago Agonistes works upon our sensibilities like a heroic metaphor achieved naturally and without manifest heroics. The result, a dividend above and beyond the pleasure of reading a fine story, is the discovery of an open-sided trope in which every man may locate some of the profounder aspects of his own spiritual biography. The second point enters the region of religious experience. The theme of what is Christlike in every good man has grown in upon Hemingway since 1940, when the Christian Anselmo, another aged man, was established as the moral norm in For Whom the Bell Tolls. The ancient Santiago, stumbling out of his boat with dried blood on his face from a partly healed wound, and with the deep cord-cuts like stigmata on his hands, carries the mast over his shoulder up the hill. Sleeping exhaustedly face down on the spread newspapers that cover springs of his bed, he lies cruciform, with arms out straight and palms turned upwards. In hoc signo vinces. He has entered the Masonic order of Christian heroes. In short, Hemingway has enhanced the native power of his tragic parable by engaging, though unobtrusively, the further power of Christian symbolism. Somewhere between its parabolical and its Christian meaning lies one important explanation of this book’s power to move us. The Old Man and The Sea is a great short novel, told with consummate artistry and destined to become a classic in its kind. It is a good kind of present for a man to give the world on or about his fifty-third birthday. *Somewhat edited per class guidelines. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-sea.html?_r=2 September 7, 1952 Hemingway's Tragic Fisherman By ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS The "Old Man" is a Cuban, without money to buy proper gear or even food, and past the days of his greatest strength, when he THE OLD MAN AND was "El CampÈon" of the docks. He fishes for his living, far out THE SEA By Ernest Hemingway. in the Gulf Stream, in a skiff with patched sails. It is September, the month of hurricanes and of the biggest fish. After eightyfour luckless days a marlin strikes his bait a hundred fathoms below the boat. The old man, Santiago, is "fast to the biggest fish that he had ever seen and bigger than he had ever heard of." The ultimate is now demanded of the craft which a half-century of fishing has taught him. It is a tale superbly told and in the telling Ernest Hemingway uses all the craft his hard, disciplined trying over so many years has given him. Both craft--writing and fishing--are clearly in mind when the old man Santiago thinks of the strangeness of his powers as fisherman. "The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it." When the boy who took care of him asked if he was strong enough now for a truly big fish, he said, "I think so. And there are many tricks." In "Big Two-Hearted River," one of the best and happiest of his early short stories, Hemingway sent a young man very like himself off alone on a fishing trip in completely deserted country in northern Michigan. They young man, Nick, needed to be alone and to control his thinking with physical tiredness and to get back to something in himself to which memories of fishing seemed to offer a clue. The actual fishing was even better than his memories of it. He "felt all the old feeling." The trip was a success because Nick, grateful for the purity of his pleasure, was able to set himself limits. He did not go into the deep water of the swamp where the biggest fish were, but where it might be impossible to land them. "In the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it." There was plenty of time for that kind of fishing in the days to come. "The Old Man and the Sea" written more than twenty-five years later, in the maturity of Hemingway's art, is a novella whose action is directly, cleanly and, as he would say, "truly" told. And in it Hemingway has described a fishing adventure which is tragic, or as close to tragedy as fishing may be. In "The Old Man and the Sea," as in the early "Big Two-Hearted River," the art and the truth come from a sense of limits. In the new story, however, a man exceeds the limits, and pays a price for it that is more than his own suffering. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-sea.html?_r=2 The line of dramatic action in "The Old Man and the Sea" curves up and down with a classic purity of design to delight the makers of textbooks. But what Santiago brings back suggests something new about Hemingway himself, defines an attitude never so clearly present in his other work. Hemingway's heroes have nearly always been defeated, or have died, and have lost what they loved, even though the stories seemed at first to celebrate purely physical courage and prowess. The important thing was the code fought by, and keeping the right feeling toward what was fought for, and when something had been won, not to let the sharks have it. Usually the hero has been alone in his defeat, like Lieutenant Henry in "Farewell to Arms," walking back to his hotel in the rain, or Robert Jordan dying at the bridge in "For Whom the Bell Tolls," or Harry Morgan, also a Gulf fisherman, in "To Have and Have Not," gasping out, with a bullet through his stomach, "One man alone ain't got no bloody. . .chance." Often his people have been profoundly bitter in defeat, like Belmonte, the matador, in "The Sun Also Rises," sick with a fistula, jeered at by the crowd, putting his head on the barrera, not seeing or hearing anything, just going through his pain, or the demoted Colonel Cantwell in "Across the River and into the Trees," trying to find abusive enough epithets for Truman and the political generals and a writer whose face he doesn't like. "Seems like when they get started they don't leave a guy nothing," the boy says at the end of "My Old Man." This is the nothingness, the "nada" of the famous parody of the Lord's Prayer in "A Clean Well-Lighted Place." This is the world of the non-religious existentialists like Heidegger and Sartre, a world of self-imposed codes and devotions sustained wholly by the courage and will of the individual, by his capacity for facing his own truths, for leading an "authentic" existence. If he fails, he encounters nothingness, meaninglessness, both in human society and the indifferent realm of nature. In "The Old Man and the Sea," it is all quite different. The old man has learned humility, which he knew "was not disgraceful, and carried no less of true pride." Humility understands the limits of what a man can do alone, and knows how much his being, the worth and humanity of his being, depends on community with other men and with nature, which is here the sea. Santiago has the language to express this, as the American Harry Morgan did not. Santiago speaks in those formalized idioms from the Romance languages which in so many of Hemingway's stories have served to express ideas of dignity, propriety and love. Santiago lives in a good town where he had been happy with his wife, and where there is now the boy. He had taught the boy fishing, and the boy loves him. "QuÈ va," the boy says devotedly. "There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only you." Hemingway we know was himself a champion, a great winner of boxing matches and game fishing contests at Key West and in the Bahamas in the Thirties. But in the later http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-sea.html?_r=2 stories, in an uncomfortably personal way, it seemed not enough for the hero to know he was a champion. He needed adulation from those around him, from waiters, people of old families and especially sexually satisfied women who had so little being apart from him that they created none of the moral demands, the difficult ups and downs of any normal human relationship. It is a little like this with Santiago and the boy, but the old man, to repeat, has humility, and the shared craft of fishing is a reality between them. What he brings back to the boy at the end of the story implies a human continuity and development that far transcends this individual relationship. When Santiago says "Man is not made for defeat," he is not thinking primarily of the individual. Even without the boy Santiago is not alone on a sea, which, with its creatures, he knows well and loves with discrimination. The sea is feminine for him, as it is not for the motorboat men. The Gulf Stream takes him out where he wants to go, and the trade winds bring him back, with lights of Havana to guide him. When the huge marlin strikes, he is bound in shared suffering with a fellow creature for whom he finds adjectives like "calm" and "beautiful" and "noble." Santiago does not like to kill, and he does like to think, except about sin, which he is not sure he believes in. Santiago's simplicity together with the articulateness of his soliloquies sometimes makes him seem a personified attitude of his complex creator rather than a concrete personality in his own right. The action is wonderfully particularized, but not the man to whom it happens and who gives it meaning. The talk of baseball, of the "great DiMaggio" and the "Tigres" of Detroit does not help in this. And the references to sin inevitably recall that other American story of the pursuit of a big fish in which Melville went rather more deeply down among "the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea," that dark invisible sphere formed "in fright" as well as love. But these are simply the bounds rather than the faults of a short tale magnificently told. Like "Across the River and into the Trees," "The Old Man and the Sea" (a September Book-of-the-Month dual choice) is an interruption in the long major work which has engaged Hemingway since the war. But it is not a disturbing interruption, as "Across the River" sometimes was in its moments of tastelessness and spleen. In his imagination of the fishing in "The Old Man and the Sea," Hemingway has, like the young man in "Big Two-Hearted River," got back to something good and true in himself, that has always been there. And with it are new indications of humility and maturity and a deeper sense of being at home in life which promise well for the novel in the making. Hemingway is still a great writer, with the strength and craft and courage to go far out, and perhaps even far down, for the truly big ones. Mr. Davis, Professor of English at Smith College, writes frequently of the techniques of creative writing. TIME Monday, Sep. 08, 1952 Books: Clean & Straight THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA (140 pp.)—Ernest Hemingway—Scribner ($3). For a long time, Ernest Hemingway has wanted to write a story that he did not think he could. Now, he has written it. It is a very short (27,000-word) novel called The Old Man and the Sea, and it may be what he thinks it is: the best work he has ever done. Says Hemingway: “I have had to read it now over 200 times and every time it does something to me. It’s as though I had gotten finally what I had been working for all my life.” In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway has written about: 1) the place that now interests and excites him most, the Gulf Stream near Cuba; 2) a skill he knows and enjoys, big-game fishing; 3) a fundamental contest of life that has always fascinated him: a man of unquestionable courage, character, and simple decency pitted against unconquerable natural forces. Good Luck. The scene is Cuba. The old man, a widower, lives alone in a small shack near the harbor. He makes his living as a fisherman; but for 84 consecutive days, he has failed to bring in a single fish. His helper, a young boy named Manolin, who is devoted to him and whom the old man loves, has been forced by his family to leave the unlucky old man and find work on a more successful boat. But the boy still brings him bait and food. Gnarled and bone weary, the old man can only doze and dream and hope that his luck will change. Before dawn on the 85th day, feeling somehow confident, the old man sets out again in his skiff. “Good luck, old man,” says Manolin. “Good luck,” answers the old man. Far out in the Gulf Stream, 600 feet down, a big marlin takes the bait. Joining his ancient skill to his failing strength, the old man plays him with care and respect. When his adversary leaps from the water for the first time: The line rose slowly and steadily and then the surface of the ocean bulged ahead of the boat and the fish came out. He came out unendingly and water poured from his sides. He was bright in the sun and his head and back were dark purple and in the sun the stripes on his side showed wide and a light lavender. His sword was as long as a baseball bat and tapered like a rapier and he rose his full length from the water and then re-entered it. smoothly, like a diver and the old man saw the great scythe-blade of his tail go under and the line commenced to race out. Bad Break. The old man fights the great fish for two days and nights, sustained by his courage, his respect for his foe, a few swallows of water, a few mouthfuls of raw fish. Triumphant at last, but nearly finished himself, he lashes the enormous dead fish to the side—it is two feet longer than the skiff—and heads for home. Then come the hijacking sharks. At first, the old man kills them as they come in to attack his catch; then, his harpoon lost in one, his knife broken off in another, he gives in to the inevitable. What he brings in before dawn is a stripped skeleton, 18 feet long, which astonishes all who see it when day breaks. Wearily, the old man asks himself what beat him out there. He answers himself aloud: “Nothing, I went out too far.” But already, he and the boy are planning to go out again. The Old Man and the Sea has almost none of the old Hemingway truculence, the hardguy sentimentality that sometimes gives even his most devoted admirers twinges of discomfort. As a story, it is clean and straight. Those who admire craftsmanship will be right in calling it a masterpiece. Its meaning? Critics will find as many as there are critical cults. But The Old Man is only better Hemingway, not fundamentally different. It is a poem of action, praising a brave man, a magnificent fish and the sea, with perhaps a new underlying reverence for the Creator of such wonders. Was The Old Man meant to stand alone, or is it part of some grander scheme? For many years, the U.S. publishing world has buzzed with rumors of a “big” Hemingway novel which would dwarf anything he had previously written. Across the River and into the Trees (TIME, Sept. 11, 1950) was said to be an interim job. With publication last week in LIFE of The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway was ready to throw some light on his work and hopes. Said he, in reply to a cable from TIME : I have written and re-written some 200,000 words of what eventually will be a long book about the sea. It is divided into four separate books any one of which may be published separately. When writing, I dislike talking about my work or my plans. This is not from boorishness but because I have found that it is bad for a writer to talk about what he is doing. But I can tell you that I hope to write novels and short stories as long as I live, and I would like to live for a long time. Edited per class guidelines from: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,935713,00.html Saturday Review September 6, 1952 (pp 10-11) The Marvel Who Must Die* Carlos Baker The admirable Santiago, Hemingway’s ancient mariner and protagonist of this triumphant short novel, enters the gallery of permanent heroes effortlessly, as if he had belonged there from the beginning. Indeed he has. His story belongs as much in our time as that of Nick Adams. He is one of the men without women, fighting it out alone with only a brave heart for company. He is one of the winners who takes nothing. Though he does not die, he is one of those for whom the bell tolls. What Santiago has at the close of his story is what all the heroes of Hemingway have had—the proud, quiet knowledge of having fought the fight, of having lasted it out, of having done a great thing to the bitter end of human strength. Santiago, in the sum of things, is a tragic hero. His story, architectonically speaking, shows a natural tragic pattern. After eighty-four days without a strike, the old man rises in the cool dark morning and rows out alone towards the mile-deep Gulf Stream. It is the month of September, the time of the big fish. Toward noon of this eighty-fifth day, trolling his baits at various levels, he hooks a huge marlin down in the green dark of a hundred fathoms. Then, through that long afternoon, and the night, and another day and another night, he hangs on with the line over his shoulder while his skiff is towed slowly north-eastward through the calm September sea. Living on strips of raw bonito, a flying fish, and part of a dolphin, washed down with nips from his water-bottle, Santiago takes and endures almost infinite pains. Twice the fish leaps clear of the water, trying to throw the hook. But it is not until noon of the third day out that Santiago manages to bring his great trophy finally to the surface and to drive his harpoon into that other fighting heart. The marlin is two feet longer than the skiff, too big to hoist aboard even if the old man’s strength were still equal to the task. He lashes it alongside, comes about, and sets his patched old sail for home. An hour later, the first shark comes. The tragedy of subtraction begins. Number one is a handsome Mako, big and voracious, with eight ranking rows of teeth. Santiago kills him with the harpoon, which is lost when the Mako sinks. Also lost, like a piece of the courageous old man’s heart, is a great forty-pound bite from the side of the prize fish. What is worse, the scent of its blood spreads through the water like a lure for all the sea’s rapacious attackers. Two more presently close in—ugly, shovel-nosed Galanos sharks, rending and tearing what the old man has earned by the sweat of his brow, the blood of his hands, and the indomitable pride of his endurance. Like the first, these are killed. But others follow: one, then a pair, and finally in the night a whole anonymous pack. Santiago fights them off with all his has (his knife lashed to an oar-butt, the boat’s club, the tiller) until these break or are lost and there are no more weapons. Yet now there is no more trophy, either. If the old man were to look overside in the dark, he would see only the bony head, the proud perpendicular tail, and the picked white skeleton of his prize. The old man does not bother to look. He knows too well what has happened. Once more, in his lengthening career as one of the few genuine tragic writers of modern times, Hemingway has memorably engaged a theme familiar to tragic literature. Santiago belongs among all those who have the strength and dignity to fight against great odds and to win moral victories even though the tangible rewards may be lost in the process of the battle. On the heroic level, one thinks of Melville’s Ahab, Whitman’s Columbus, Sandburg’s Lincoln. But the great skill here has been to take a simple fisherman and—by setting his struggle against the background of the ancient and unchanging sea, and pitting him against an adversary worthy of his strength—bring out his native ability and indomitability until, once having known him, we can never afterwards lose sight of him. Wordsworth’s Michael and his leechgatherer are pastoral types, artfully projected against the English hills and plains, showing the resolution and independence which always tugged at Wordsworth’s heartstrings, as Santiago’s tug at ours. Yet the pitch here attained and held to is several degrees above the plane of pastoral tragedy. It approaches, as a tragic pattern, the story of King Lear, whose shark-hearted daughters bled him of his dominions and his hundred knights, yet left his dignity unimpaired and his native courage unshaken. “I will show him what a man can do,” says Santiago of his marlin, “and what a man endures.” The thousand times he has proved his worth before mean nothing. Now, climactically, he is proving it again, earning nothing more tangible than our sympathy and admiration. “One cannot hope to explain,” says the publisher’s commentary, “why the reading of this book is so profound an experience.” Once can, however, at least begin to explain the essence of the experience by making two related observations about it. The first is that the story not only shows a natural tragic pattern (which is no doubt why Hemingway was drawn to it); it develops also as a kind of natural parable. Like human life, for which it easily stands as an extended image, the struggle commences, grows, and subsides between one sleep and another. The parable of Santiago Agonistes works upon our sensibilities like a heroic metaphor achieved naturally and without manifest heroics. The result, a dividend above and beyond the pleasure of reading a fine story, is the discovery of an open-sided trope in which every man may locate some of the profounder aspects of his own spiritual biography. The second point enters the region of religious experience. The theme of what is Christlike in every good man has grown in upon Hemingway since 1940, when the Christian Anselmo, another aged man, was established as the moral norm in For Whom the Bell Tolls. The ancient Santiago, stumbling out of his boat with dried blood on his face from a partly healed wound, and with the deep cord-cuts like stigmata on his hands, carries the mast over his shoulder up the hill. Sleeping exhaustedly face down on the spread newspapers that cover springs of his bed, he lies cruciform, with arms out straight and palms turned upwards. In hoc signo vinces. He has entered the Masonic order of Christian heroes. In short, Hemingway has enhanced the native power of his tragic parable by engaging, though unobtrusively, the further power of Christian symbolism. Somewhere between its parabolical and its Christian meaning lies one important explanation of this book’s power to move us. The Old Man and The Sea is a great short novel, told with consummate artistry and destined to become a classic in its kind. It is a good kind of present for a man to give the world on or about his fifty-third birthday. *Somewhat edited per class guidelines. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-sea.html?_r=2 September 7, 1952 Hemingway's Tragic Fisherman By ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS The "Old Man" is a Cuban, without money to buy proper gear or even food, and past the days of his greatest strength, when he THE OLD MAN AND was "El CampÈon" of the docks. He fishes for his living, far out THE SEA By Ernest Hemingway. in the Gulf Stream, in a skiff with patched sails. It is September, the month of hurricanes and of the biggest fish. After eightyfour luckless days a marlin strikes his bait a hundred fathoms below the boat. The old man, Santiago, is "fast to the biggest fish that he had ever seen and bigger than he had ever heard of." The ultimate is now demanded of the craft which a half-century of fishing has taught him. It is a tale superbly told and in the telling Ernest Hemingway uses all the craft his hard, disciplined trying over so many years has given him. Both craft--writing and fishing--are clearly in mind when the old man Santiago thinks of the strangeness of his powers as fisherman. "The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it." When the boy who took care of him asked if he was strong enough now for a truly big fish, he said, "I think so. And there are many tricks." In "Big Two-Hearted River," one of the best and happiest of his early short stories, Hemingway sent a young man very like himself off alone on a fishing trip in completely deserted country in northern Michigan. They young man, Nick, needed to be alone and to control his thinking with physical tiredness and to get back to something in himself to which memories of fishing seemed to offer a clue. The actual fishing was even better than his memories of it. He "felt all the old feeling." The trip was a success because Nick, grateful for the purity of his pleasure, was able to set himself limits. He did not go into the deep water of the swamp where the biggest fish were, but where it might be impossible to land them. "In the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it." There was plenty of time for that kind of fishing in the days to come. "The Old Man and the Sea" written more than twenty-five years later, in the maturity of Hemingway's art, is a novella whose action is directly, cleanly and, as he would say, "truly" told. And in it Hemingway has described a fishing adventure which is tragic, or as close to tragedy as fishing may be. In "The Old Man and the Sea," as in the early "Big Two-Hearted River," the art and the truth come from a sense of limits. In the new story, however, a man exceeds the limits, and pays a price for it that is more than his own suffering. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-sea.html?_r=2 The line of dramatic action in "The Old Man and the Sea" curves up and down with a classic purity of design to delight the makers of textbooks. But what Santiago brings back suggests something new about Hemingway himself, defines an attitude never so clearly present in his other work. Hemingway's heroes have nearly always been defeated, or have died, and have lost what they loved, even though the stories seemed at first to celebrate purely physical courage and prowess. The important thing was the code fought by, and keeping the right feeling toward what was fought for, and when something had been won, not to let the sharks have it. Usually the hero has been alone in his defeat, like Lieutenant Henry in "Farewell to Arms," walking back to his hotel in the rain, or Robert Jordan dying at the bridge in "For Whom the Bell Tolls," or Harry Morgan, also a Gulf fisherman, in "To Have and Have Not," gasping out, with a bullet through his stomach, "One man alone ain't got no bloody. . .chance." Often his people have been profoundly bitter in defeat, like Belmonte, the matador, in "The Sun Also Rises," sick with a fistula, jeered at by the crowd, putting his head on the barrera, not seeing or hearing anything, just going through his pain, or the demoted Colonel Cantwell in "Across the River and into the Trees," trying to find abusive enough epithets for Truman and the political generals and a writer whose face he doesn't like. "Seems like when they get started they don't leave a guy nothing," the boy says at the end of "My Old Man." This is the nothingness, the "nada" of the famous parody of the Lord's Prayer in "A Clean Well-Lighted Place." This is the world of the non-religious existentialists like Heidegger and Sartre, a world of self-imposed codes and devotions sustained wholly by the courage and will of the individual, by his capacity for facing his own truths, for leading an "authentic" existence. If he fails, he encounters nothingness, meaninglessness, both in human society and the indifferent realm of nature. In "The Old Man and the Sea," it is all quite different. The old man has learned humility, which he knew "was not disgraceful, and carried no less of true pride." Humility understands the limits of what a man can do alone, and knows how much his being, the worth and humanity of his being, depends on community with other men and with nature, which is here the sea. Santiago has the language to express this, as the American Harry Morgan did not. Santiago speaks in those formalized idioms from the Romance languages which in so many of Hemingway's stories have served to express ideas of dignity, propriety and love. Santiago lives in a good town where he had been happy with his wife, and where there is now the boy. He had taught the boy fishing, and the boy loves him. "QuÈ va," the boy says devotedly. "There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only you." Hemingway we know was himself a champion, a great winner of boxing matches and game fishing contests at Key West and in the Bahamas in the Thirties. But in the later http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-sea.html?_r=2 stories, in an uncomfortably personal way, it seemed not enough for the hero to know he was a champion. He needed adulation from those around him, from waiters, people of old families and especially sexually satisfied women who had so little being apart from him that they created none of the moral demands, the difficult ups and downs of any normal human relationship. It is a little like this with Santiago and the boy, but the old man, to repeat, has humility, and the shared craft of fishing is a reality between them. What he brings back to the boy at the end of the story implies a human continuity and development that far transcends this individual relationship. When Santiago says "Man is not made for defeat," he is not thinking primarily of the individual. Even without the boy Santiago is not alone on a sea, which, with its creatures, he knows well and loves with discrimination. The sea is feminine for him, as it is not for the motorboat men. The Gulf Stream takes him out where he wants to go, and the trade winds bring him back, with lights of Havana to guide him. When the huge marlin strikes, he is bound in shared suffering with a fellow creature for whom he finds adjectives like "calm" and "beautiful" and "noble." Santiago does not like to kill, and he does like to think, except about sin, which he is not sure he believes in. Santiago's simplicity together with the articulateness of his soliloquies sometimes makes him seem a personified attitude of his complex creator rather than a concrete personality in his own right. The action is wonderfully particularized, but not the man to whom it happens and who gives it meaning. The talk of baseball, of the "great DiMaggio" and the "Tigres" of Detroit does not help in this. And the references to sin inevitably recall that other American story of the pursuit of a big fish in which Melville went rather more deeply down among "the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea," that dark invisible sphere formed "in fright" as well as love. But these are simply the bounds rather than the faults of a short tale magnificently told. Like "Across the River and into the Trees," "The Old Man and the Sea" (a September Book-of-the-Month dual choice) is an interruption in the long major work which has engaged Hemingway since the war. But it is not a disturbing interruption, as "Across the River" sometimes was in its moments of tastelessness and spleen. In his imagination of the fishing in "The Old Man and the Sea," Hemingway has, like the young man in "Big Two-Hearted River," got back to something good and true in himself, that has always been there. And with it are new indications of humility and maturity and a deeper sense of being at home in life which promise well for the novel in the making. Hemingway is still a great writer, with the strength and craft and courage to go far out, and perhaps even far down, for the truly big ones. Mr. Davis, Professor of English at Smith College, writes frequently of the techniques of creative writing. TIME Monday, Sep. 08, 1952 Books: Clean & Straight THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA (140 pp.)—Ernest Hemingway—Scribner ($3). For a long time, Ernest Hemingway has wanted to write a story that he did not think he could. Now, he has written it. It is a very short (27,000-word) novel called The Old Man and the Sea, and it may be what he thinks it is: the best work he has ever done. Says Hemingway: “I have had to read it now over 200 times and every time it does something to me. It’s as though I had gotten finally what I had been working for all my life.” In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway has written about: 1) the place that now interests and excites him most, the Gulf Stream near Cuba; 2) a skill he knows and enjoys, big-game fishing; 3) a fundamental contest of life that has always fascinated him: a man of unquestionable courage, character, and simple decency pitted against unconquerable natural forces. Good Luck. The scene is Cuba. The old man, a widower, lives alone in a small shack near the harbor. He makes his living as a fisherman; but for 84 consecutive days, he has failed to bring in a single fish. His helper, a young boy named Manolin, who is devoted to him and whom the old man loves, has been forced by his family to leave the unlucky old man and find work on a more successful boat. But the boy still brings him bait and food. Gnarled and bone weary, the old man can only doze and dream and hope that his luck will change. Before dawn on the 85th day, feeling somehow confident, the old man sets out again in his skiff. “Good luck, old man,” says Manolin. “Good luck,” answers the old man. Far out in the Gulf Stream, 600 feet down, a big marlin takes the bait. Joining his ancient skill to his failing strength, the old man plays him with care and respect. When his adversary leaps from the water for the first time: The line rose slowly and steadily and then the surface of the ocean bulged ahead of the boat and the fish came out. He came out unendingly and water poured from his sides. He was bright in the sun and his head and back were dark purple and in the sun the stripes on his side showed wide and a light lavender. His sword was as long as a baseball bat and tapered like a rapier and he rose his full length from the water and then re-entered it. smoothly, like a diver and the old man saw the great scythe-blade of his tail go under and the line commenced to race out. Bad Break. The old man fights the great fish for two days and nights, sustained by his courage, his respect for his foe, a few swallows of water, a few mouthfuls of raw fish. Triumphant at last, but nearly finished himself, he lashes the enormous dead fish to the side—it is two feet longer than the skiff—and heads for home. Then come the hijacking sharks. At first, the old man kills them as they come in to attack his catch; then, his harpoon lost in one, his knife broken off in another, he gives in to the inevitable. What he brings in before dawn is a stripped skeleton, 18 feet long, which astonishes all who see it when day breaks. Wearily, the old man asks himself what beat him out there. He answers himself aloud: “Nothing, I went out too far.” But already, he and the boy are planning to go out again. The Old Man and the Sea has almost none of the old Hemingway truculence, the hardguy sentimentality that sometimes gives even his most devoted admirers twinges of discomfort. As a story, it is clean and straight. Those who admire craftsmanship will be right in calling it a masterpiece. Its meaning? Critics will find as many as there are critical cults. But The Old Man is only better Hemingway, not fundamentally different. It is a poem of action, praising a brave man, a magnificent fish and the sea, with perhaps a new underlying reverence for the Creator of such wonders. Was The Old Man meant to stand alone, or is it part of some grander scheme? For many years, the U.S. publishing world has buzzed with rumors of a “big” Hemingway novel which would dwarf anything he had previously written. Across the River and into the Trees (TIME, Sept. 11, 1950) was said to be an interim job. With publication last week in LIFE of The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway was ready to throw some light on his work and hopes. Said he, in reply to a cable from TIME : I have written and re-written some 200,000 words of what eventually will be a long book about the sea. It is divided into four separate books any one of which may be published separately. When writing, I dislike talking about my work or my plans. This is not from boorishness but because I have found that it is bad for a writer to talk about what he is doing. But I can tell you that I hope to write novels and short stories as long as I live, and I would like to live for a long time. Edited per class guidelines from: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,935713,00.html
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Final Essay

Written by Hemingway Ernest and published in 1952, The Old Man and the Sea is a
novella about an old man who is a fisherman. The story takes place in the 1940s in
Cuba, near Havana where Hemingway lived. Hemingway love of nature influenced the
story. Also, his denial that his writing career was finished. Publishing the book was a
highlight for his long career as a writer. Hemingway use of English prose in short and
straight sentences was his breakthrough when the novella got published. The numerous
awards he won including the Nobel Prize in Literature remains the proof of his success.
Therefore, the book has a great historical significance.
The story begins with an old man, Santiago who is a fisherman. He has neither caught
fish in eighty-four days nor eaten well. A young boy Manolin, who is a friend he taught
fishing, brings him food. Santiago dreams of the lions he saw in Africa and head out to
fish during the day. He hooks a big fish, marlin which introduces series of struggles.
The battle of will lasts for three days as the old man feels the fish is not an enemy, but
instead, a brother. He resolves to kill it and, on his way, he is attacked by sharks who
manages to eats the fish. When he gets on the shore, he only has the skeleton of the fish.
In the end, he goes to sleep and dreams of the lions again. Three critics appreciated
Santiago and Hemingway as tragic heroes, so did I.
Critic Baker notes that Santiago is a tragic hero and Hemingway, a tragic writer. Baker
claims that “Santiago belongs among all those who have the strength and dignity to
fight against all the odds and to win moral victories even though the tangible reward
may be lost” (¶ 6). Baker outlines that the story shows a natural tragic pattern and
religious experience. The old man has caught no fish for long but has never given up.
He claims that “I could just drift and sleep, but today is eighty-five days, and I should
fish the day well” (10). Even when he eventually catches a big fish and battles with
sharks, Santiago fights to the bitter end of his strength. He arrives with just a skeleton,
but he is still a hero. Therefore, Santiago and Hemingway are heroes whose
determination made them successful.
I agree with Baker’s critic that both Santiago and Hemingway are tragic heroes.
Hemingway notes that the old man tells the fish that “he will stay with it until he is
dead” (14), to show his willingness to endure the battle. He is determined to win and
prove himself as a great fisherman. Despite the overwhelming odds against him,
Santiago never gave up even after the fish is dead. At the end of the story the boy in
tears by his admiration of the old’s man determination. It is the same situation in
Hemingway’s historical background. He received critics from his fellows, but he never

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Excellent resource! Really helped me get the gist of things.

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