The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
(Summary)
The
Old Man and the Sea is the story of an epic struggle between an old,
experienced fisherman and the greatest catch of his life. For 84 days, the old
fisherman Santiago has caught nothing. Alone, impoverished, and facing his own
mortality, Santiago is now considered unlucky. So conspicuously unlucky is he
that the parents of his young, devoted apprentice and friend, Manolin, have forced
the boy to leave the old man in order to fish in a more prosperous boat. Every
evening, though, when Santiago again returns empty-handed, Manolin helps carry
home the old man's equipment, keeps him company, and brings him food and
discusses the latest developments in American baseball, especially the trials
of the old man’s hero, Joe DiMaggio. Santiago is confident that his
unproductive streak will soon come to an end, and he resolves to sail out
farther than usual the following day.
On
the eighty-fifth day of his unlucky streak, Santiago does as promise. Santiago
sets out before dawn on a three-day odyssey that takes him far out to sea. He
prepares his lines and drops them. At noon, a big fish, which he knows is a
marlin, takes the bait, that Santiago has placed one hundred fathoms deep in
the waters. The old man expertly hooks the fish, but he cannot pull it in.
Instead, the fish begins to pull the boat.
Santiago
bears the strain of the line with his shoulders, back, and hands, ready to give
slack, should the marlin make a run. The fish pulls the boat all through the
day, through the night, through another day, and through another night. It
swims steadily northwest until at last it tires and swims east with the
current. The entire time, Santiago endures constant pain from the fishing line.
Whenever the fish lunges, leaps, or makes a dash for freedom, the cord cuts
Santiago badly. Although wounded and weary, the old man feels a deep empathy
and admiration for the marlin, his brother in suffering, strength, and resolve.
On
the third day the fish tires, and Santiago, sleep-deprived and nearly
delirious, manages to pull the marlin in close enough to kill it with a
harpoon. Dead beside the skiff, the marlin is the largest Santiago has ever
seen. He straps it to his boat, raises the small mast, and sets sail for home.
While Santiago is excited by the price that the marlin will bring at market, he
is more concerned that the people who will eat the fish are unworthy of its
greatness.
As
Santiago sails on with the fish, the marlin’s blood leaves a trail in the water
and attracts packs of shovel-nosed sharks. With whatever equipment remains on
board, Santiago repeatedly fights off the packs of these scavengers, enduring
exhaustion and great physical pain, even tearing something in his chest. The
first to attack is a great mako shark, which Santiago manages to slay with the
harpoon. In the struggle, the old man loses the harpoon and lengths of valuable
rope, which leaves him vulnerable to other shark attacks. The old man fights
off the successive vicious predators as best he can, stabbing at them with a
crude spear he makes by lashing a knife to an oar, and even clubbing them with
the boat’s tiller. Although he kills several sharks, more and more appear, and
by the time night falls, Santiago’s continued fight against the scavengers is
useless. They devour the marlin’s precious meat, leaving only skeleton, head,
and tail. Santiago chastises himself for going “out too far,” and for
sacrificing his great and worthy opponent. He arrives home before daybreak,
stumbles back to his shack, and sleeps very deeply.
The
next morning, Manolin finds Santiago in his hut and cries over the old man's
injuries. Manolin fetches coffee and hears from the other fisherman what he had
already seen — that the marlin's skeleton lashed to the skiff is eighteen feet
long, the greatest fish the village has known. Manolin sits with Santiago until
he awakes and then gives the old man some coffee. The old man tells Manolin
that he was beaten. But Manolin reassures him that the great fish didn't beat
him and that they will fish together again, that luck doesn't matter, and that
the old man still has much to teach him.
That
afternoon, some tourists see the marlin's skeleton waiting to go out with the
tide and ask a waiter what it is. Trying to explain what happened to the
marlin, the waiter replies, "Eshark." But the tourists misunderstand
and assume that's what the skeleton is.
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