Extensive Reading

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

ANALYSIS

By:

SULFA RAIS
(A1M2 16 083)

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
TEACHER TRAINING AND EDUCATION SCIENCE FACULTY
HALU OLEO UNIVERSITY
KENDARI
2018
 THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA ANALYSIS
Intrinsic Analysis

1. Theme
The main theme of the story is heroism. Santiago makes up for his age
with his endurance to withstand hunger, pain and isolation. He does not blame the
sharks for snatching the marlin, but he acknowledges that it is his mistake to have
ventured far inward into the sea. As a fisher who has caught no fish in 84 days,
Santiago is fighting against defeat. However, he does not yield because he moves
further into the sea than he has ever sailed before. He struggles with the marlin
despite his exhaustion and pain. After catching it, he hopelessly fights off the
sharks. Whenever the situation gets difficult and he is threatened with despair, he
uses various tactics to stimulate his opposition to defeat: He recollects memories
of his strength while he was young through dreams, and sometimes prays to God.
Santiago has unlimited potentialities in the presence of danger. His potential is
realized when he manages to get the giant marlin. However, the outcome is less
significant than the struggle as he also chooses to battle with the sharks. As a
result, it is not really important that he brings the marlin home; the important
thing is he wins the battle, and after the struggle he becomes a hero.
2. Plot Analysis
Most good stories start with a fundamental list of ingredients: the initial
situation, conflict, complication, climax, suspense, denouement, and conclusion.
Great writers sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice.
a. Initial Situation
The old man hasn’t caught a fish in eighty-four days. It’s cramping his
style.
This situation has been the situation for a while. Eighty-four days, in
fact. And it has to end soon, since winter is coming and the old man has no 1)
food 2) money or 3) clothing for warmth. Sounds like it’s time for a conflict,
quite possibly leading to a climax.
b. Conflict
The old man hooks a marlin. The really, really, ridiculously big marlin.
Water splashing, back-breaking work, agonizing pain and a
declaration of fight to the death – this climax certainly rocks the boat.
c. Complication
The fish puts up one hell of a fight over three days, and the old man’s
body may be failing him.
 This is not a simple hook, line, and sinker fishing endeavour. And no,
we have no intentions of stopping these awful puns. As you might expect,
shortly after the conflict, things get complicated. The fish turns out to be
about a gazillion pounds and the old man gets a cramp in his hand. Not to
mention all the talking to himself and psychological complexity of his
feelings for the fish, a.k.a. his brother, enemy, and dear friend.
d. Climax
The old man harpoons the marlin to death.
We’ve been building toward this very moment for about, oh, 80 pages
now. We waited for it, waited for it, waited for it…and now it’s here. That
makes it a climax, as far as we’re concerned.
e. Suspense
Jaws! Rather, the sharks attack.
But all is not done. There’s that pesky suspense stage, which in this
case takes the form of several vicious sharks followed by a pack of even more
vicious sharks. Will the sharks eat the fish? Will the old man kill the sharks?
Is he going to collapse from exhaustion?
f. Denouement
The old man resigns himself to the fact that his fish is eaten, and he is
beaten…supposedly.
The old man accepts this fact rather calmly. You know, after trying to
club a pack of man-eating sharks to death. Because the suspense and action
are over, and you breathe a sigh of relief (or more a sigh of depressed
acceptance, in this case), you know you’re at the denouement. Also, you just
had the suspense stage, and you know this one comes next.
g. Conclusion
The old man dreams about the lions.
What a great conclusion. Seriously – Hemingway built up this whole
lion thing throughout the text, just subtly weaving it through, asking us to
notice without beating us on the head with a sign that says, "LIONS AND
IMAGERY THIS WAY." Then he ends with this deceptively simple line. It’s
bittersweet, and it makes you ask lots of conclusion-y questions about
whether the old man was defeated, if he’ll go on to fish another day, and just
what’s the deal with these lions.
3. Setting
Where It All Goes Down
Cuba, near Havana, in the 1940’s. Mostly on the water.
 Most of the novella takes place in the old man’s boat out on the sea.
Hence the title The Old Man and the Sea, not The Old Man and His Shack, or
The Old Man and the Fishing Village. Santiago has to do battle not only with the
fish, but also with the elements, as he faces the sun (hurts his eyes) and the night
(too cold for comfort). The old man interacts with his environment, commenting
frequently on the sun, moon, and stars.
4. Narratot Point Of View
Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can
we trust her or him?
Third Person (Omniscient)
The point of view is rather self-explanatory. Some disembodied voice tells
us what’s up and head-hops from the old man’s thoughts to the thoughts of the
boy with ease.
5. Tone
Factual, but sympathetic
The author clearly feels something for the old man and his struggles.
There’s not really any humor, and the whole fishing endeavor is taken very
seriously. The simple statement of emotions and thoughts gives us a raw view
into the head and heart of this endearing fisherman.
6. Language Style
Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
a. DiMaggio and The Bone Spur
We know, we know – what in the world is a bone spur? In short, it’s a
painful injury DiMaggio had in his heel right around the time The Old Man
and the Sea takes place. DiMaggio ended up being completely successful
despite his handicap – kind of like the old man. DiMaggio becomes a symbol
for withstanding pain, for endurance throughout suffering, to achieve the
impossible and lots of other grand notions the old man emulates.
b. The Lions
Hemingway just about sums it up when the old man asks: "Why are
the lions the main thing that is left?" What a fantastic question. The old man,
we are told, "no longer" dreams about people – just the places, and namely
the lions. You can go a few directions with this. First, the lions are a memory
from his youth. Much of his struggle with the fish is about proving that he’s
still there. The old man has a statement to make: he’s still around, and he’s
still rocking the boat. In other words, his past, including the lions, isn’t just a
distant memory.
 The other question is, why lions? Why not geese or alligators? To start
off, lions are strong creatures, predators, hunters, just as the old man hunts the
marlin. They’re also the head honchos. Even though they’re at the top, they
have to go out every day, hunt, and prove that they’re, well, still the head
honchos.
Where are we getting this from? Take a look at paragraphs 76 and 77
on day three (right before the memory of arm wrestling). The old man says he
needs to prove that he is a strange man. "Strange" doesn’t mean weird here; it
means unique or different. It is the old man’s strangeness that enables him to
be alone on the sea doing battle with a marlin for three days, just as he calls
the marlin "strange" for not being tired.
But back to the proving part. The old man has to prove, in a sense, his
strength, his prowess, his abilities. And he talks about having to prove himself
rather elegantly for a paragraph.
7. Message
The story is basically teaching us not to give up, even though our fight
may seem senseless. Hemingway wants his readers to realize that fighting
shouldn’t have any material meanings. One has to beat his opponent for his own
satisfaction and to prove for oneself that he is able to fight to the end.
Hemingway wanted people to see that everyone has to feel respect for his or her
rival.

Hemingway also wanted to show that everyone needs a friend. Santiago

wouldn’t survive without his friend’s Manolin support. Boy didn’t leave his
friend even though his bad luck was known for everyone.
The story relates to people’s everyday life. It doesn’t necessary mean that
everyone have to fight with strong marlin. It’s just a metaphor for people’s
problems. We, just like Santiago, have to accept our rival’s strength and power.
And just like the protagonist of The Old Man and The Sea, we cannot give up; we
have to fight to the end of our strength.

Extrinsic Analysis

Author Biography

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his

career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After
the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit
in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the
Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the
United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was
soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.

During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate

Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also
Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an
American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter.
Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the
background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among
his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea
(1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a
fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.

Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters,

bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set
against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope
and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for
understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are
collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-
Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.

Hemingway's purpose is to write both a realistic and allegorical novella that

mirrors his own twilight in his writing career. The novel is very realistic.
Hemingway lived in Cuba and was an active fisherman himself. Hemingway was
quoted in saying he wanted to write about a real fisherman:

There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is the old man.
The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are sharks, no better, no worse.
 Hemingway is a bit too literal here: there's plenty of symbolism. One cannot
write a novel about a man and a giant fish without symbolic and allegorical
connotations (think Jonah and the whale).

His purpose, allegorically, is to write a parable in which an old man achieves

greatness and yet continues to suffer with dignity--much like his own career as a
writer. Hemingway wrote Old Man when he was an old man nearing his end (he
committed suicide a few years after), and the novella garnered him the Nobel Prize in
1954 for:

"...his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old
Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style."

Just as Santiago suffers against age and the elements, so too was Hemingway
suffering against mental health and a literary community that said he was washed up
(pun intended).