The Book Starts With

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he
had gone eighty-four without days now without taking a fish.
Superbly direct, Ernest dove forthrightly. 🚀
As a reader, I didn’t have to wait a second to know who the protagonist was
going to be. At the same time it didn’t feel sudden. Also I got to know the
background of the story just like that.
But as I read in and experienced The Old Man And The Sea, and also
from the numerous articles about him, Hemingway always used radically
short sentences and terse but somehow complete descriptions. In a
documentary I watched about Hemingway, I got to understand that this
habit had stayed with him from the time of his first job as a journalist in the
newspaper The Kansas City Star, where they had a rule in the their rule
book — Write Short Sentences.
A Contrast
It was fascinating to see the shift in Santiago’s (The Old Man) state of
mind, before and during (right in the middle) of the long fishing journey he
set sail on. In the starting the old man thought
Everyday is a new day. It’s better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact.
Then when luck comes you are ready.
Towards the end, when he was tired of defending his marlin fish from the
sharks, hungry, thirsty, had strained neck and back, hands withered out of
rope tension and cut many times, mind delusional, between the constant
swings of almost giving up and getting himself up again, he said
I should have some luck… I’d like to buy some if there’s any place they
sell it.
Simple Words
This was probably the only book/story that I understood without the need of
a dictionary. The only words that I had to look up were related to fishing
equipment or boat parts’ names, or fishes and birds’ names. Hemingway
never used complicated words. Not even for the words which could replace
approximate and multiple words clauses or phrases. Yet, every meaning he
needed clarified, he did.
For example, referring to an action of a fish coming out of the water with
water sprinkling out of the fish’s body he writes:
He came out unendingly and water poured from his sides.
Amazingly simple and complete.
The Conundrum
Throughout the book, the protagonist — the old man has battled the
conscientiousness of being able to justify killing fishes.
He is a great fish and I must convince him, he thought. I must never let him
learn his strength nor what he could do if he made his run. If I were him I
would put in everything now and go until something broke. But, thank God,
they are not as intelligent as we who kill them; although they are more
noble and more able
Still I would rather be that beast down there in the darkness of the sea
“The fish is my friend too”, he said aloud. “I have never seen or heard of
such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the
stars.”
—
(…) His determination to kill him ever relaxed in his sorry for him. How
many people will he feed, he thought. But are they worthy to eat him [the
fish] ? No, of course not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the
manner of his behavior and his great dignity.
—
[After the fish was dead]: With his mouth shut and his tail straight up and
down we sail like brothers
You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought.
You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him
when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to
kill him. Or is it more?
“You think too much, old man”, he said aloud [to himself]
He’s been in a constant battle between what he is ought to do, and what
he’s supposed to do. Time and again he keeps referring to the fish he kills
later as his brother. But at the same time, he’s bounded by these
unspoken threads of responsibility as a fisherman, and as a man [see
below]. He is hemmed between these three walls of duty as a fisherman,
being able to uphold his name as a man, and feeling for the fish as his
fellow brother.
This conundrum is what consists the major part of this master piece story.
Like how we, the human beings, have a liability of maintaining societal
expectations even though one could just be heavily obliging to do so.
Manliness
I wish I could show him what sort of man I am. But then he [the fish] would
see the cramped hand. Let him think I’m more man than I’m and I will
be so
—
Although it is unjust, he thought. But I will show him [the fish] what a man
can do and what a man endures.
“I told the boy I was a strange man”, he said.
“Now is when I mus prove it”
I couldn’t fail myself and die on a fish like this
Throughout the story, there’s this tense pressure on the old man to be able
to keep his name as a man up, by chasing a fish for days, despite the fact
that it could get him killed out of starvation, or other big fishes, or weather,
or ocean itself. He just keeps going, because that’s what a man would
have done.
Repetition
One of the patterns that annoyed me was that Hemingway repeatedly
repeated words, for example
The sea was very dark and the light made prisms in the water. The
myriad flecks of the plankton were annulled now by the high sun and it was
only the great deep prisms in the blue water that the old man saw now
with his lines going straight down into the water that was a mile deep.
See the repetition of prisms and water. Not only words, but he repeated
sentences back to back.
There was much betting and people went in and out of the room (…) and
the bettors went in and out of the room.
Most of the times the repetition has extolled and added to the old man’s
feeling and emotions. But some times they felt redundant. Hemingway has
always used repetition. His most credible source of inspiration for repetition
has been Cezanne’s repeated stroke paintings, which had had a significant
influence on Hemingway. He wanted to put in words, what Cezanne put in
his paintings.