the_old_man_and_the_sea.txt

The Old Man And the Sea 

TO CHARLIE SCRIBNER 
AND 
TO MAX PERKINS 

The Old Man And the Sea 

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had 
gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been 
with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the 
old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and 
the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first 
week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty 
and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and 
harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour 
sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat. (Note: The skill of the introduction 
of the old man should be noted. He is both in time and timeless. The numbers mentioned are significant.) 

The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The 
brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on 
the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face 
and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. 
But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless 
desert. 

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as 
the sea and were cheerful and undefeated. 

"Santiago,” the boy said to him as they climbed the bank from where the skiff 
was hauled up. "I could go with you again. We've made some money. " 

The old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him. 

"No,” the old man said. "You're with a lucky boat. Stay with them. " 

"But remember how you went eighty-seven days without fish and then we 
caught big ones every day for three weeks. " 

"I remember, "the old man said,"I know you did not leave me because you 
doubted. " 

"It was papa made me leave. I am a boy and I must obey him. " 

"I know," the old man said. "It is quite normal. " 

"He hasn't much faith. " 

"No," the old man said. "But we have. Haven't we?" 

"Yes," the boy said. "Can I offer you a beer on the Terrace and then we'll take 
the stuff home. " 

"Why not?" the old man said. "Between fishermen. " 


They sat on the Terrace and many of the fishermen made fun of the old man 
and he was not angry. Others, of the older fishermen, looked at him and were sad. 
But they did not show it and they spoke politely about the current and the depths 
they had drifted their lines at and the steady good weather and of what they had 
seen. The successful fishermen of that day were already in and had butchered their 
marlin out and carried them laid full across two planks, with two men staggering 
at the end of each plank, to the fish house where they waited for the ice truck to 
carry them to the market in Havana. Those who had caught sharks had taken them 
to the shark factory on the other side of the cove where they were hoisted on a 
block and tackle, their livers removed, their fins cut off and their hides skinned out 
and their flesh cut into strips for salting. 

When the wind was in the east a smell came across the harbor from the shark 
factory; but today there was only the faint edge of the odor because the wind had 
backed into the north and then dropped off and it was pleasant and sunny on the 
Terrace. 

"Santiago,” the boy said. 

"Yes, "the old man said. He was holding his glass and thinking of many years 
ago. 

"Can I go out to get sardines for you for tomorrow?" 

" No. Go and play baseball. I can still row and Rogelio will throw the net. " 

" I would like to go. If I cannot fish with you, I would like to serve in some way." 

"You bought me a beer, "the old man said. "You are already a man. " 

"How old was I when you first took me in a boat?" 

"Five and you nearly were killed when I brought the fish in too green and he 
nearly tore the boat to pieces. Can you remember?" 

"I can remember the tail slapping and banging and the thwart breaking and the 
noise of the clubbing. I can remember you throwing me into the bow where the wet 
coiled lines were and feeling the whole boat shiver and the noise of you clubbing him 
like chopping a tree down and the sweet blood smell all over me. " 

"Can you really remember that or did I just tell it to you?" 

"I remember everything from when we first went together. " 

The old man looked at him with his sunburned, confident loving eyes. 

"If you were my boy I'd take you out and gamble,” he said. "But you are your 
father's and your mother's and you are in a lucky boat. " 

"May I get the sardines? I know where I can get four baits too. " 

"I have mine left from today. I put them in salt in the box. " 

"Let me get four fresh ones. " 

"One,” the old man said. His hope and his confidence had never gone. But now 
they were freshening as when the breeze rises. 

"Two,” the boy said. 

"Two,” the old man agreed. "You didn't steal them?" 

"I would, "the boy said. "But I bought these. " 'Thank you, 
” 
the old man said. He 
was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained 
it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride. 


"Tomorrow is going to be a good day with this current, "he said. 

"Where are you going? 
” 
the boy asked. 

"Far out to come in when the wind shifts. I want to be out before it is light. " 

"I'll try to get him to work far out, 
” 
the boy said. "Then if you hook something 
truly big we can come to your aid. " 

"He does not like to work too far out. " 

"No, "the boy said. "But I will see something that he cannot see such as a bird 
working and get him to come out after dolphin. " 

"Are his eyes that bad?" 

"He is almost blind. " 

"It is strange,” the old man said. "He never went turtle-ing. That is what kills the 
eyes. " 

"But you went turtle-ing for years off the Mosquito Coast and your eyes are good. 

"I am a strange old man. " 

"But are you strong enough now for a truly big fish?" 

"I think so. And there are many tricks. " 

"Let us take the stuff home, "the boy said. "So I can get the cast net and go after 
the sardines. " 

They picked up the gear from the boat. The old man carried the mast on his 
shoulder and the boy carried the wooden box with the coiled, hard-braided brown 
lines, the gaff and the harpoon with its shaft. The box with the baits was under the 
stern of the skiff along with the club that was used to subdue the big fish when they 
were brought alongside. No one would steal from the old man but it was better to take 
the sail and the heavy lines home as the dew was bad for them and, though he was 
quite sure no local people would steal from him, the old man thought that a gaff and a 
harpoon were needless temptations to leave in a boat. 

They walked up the road together to the old man's shack and went in through its 
open door. The old man leaned the mast with its wrapped sail against the wall and the 
boy put the box and the other gear beside it. The mast was nearly as long as the one 
room of the shack. The shack was made of the tough bud-shields of the royal palm 
which are called guano and in it there was a bed, a table, one chair, and a place on the 
dirt floor to cook with charcoal. On the brown walls of the flattened, overlapping 
leaves of the sturdy fibered guano there was a picture in color of the Sacred Heart of 
Jesus and another of the Virgin of Cobre. These were relics of his wife. Once there 
had been a tinted photograph of his wife on the wall but he had taken it down because 
it made him too lonely to see it and it was on the shelf in the corner under his clean 
shirt. (the royal palm: a tall, graceful palm of southern Florida and Cuba.) 

"What do you have to eat? " the boy asked. 

"A pot of yellow rice with fish. Do you want some?" 

"No, I will eat at home. Do you want me to make the fire?" 

"No. I will make it later on. Or I may eat the rice cold. " 

"May I take the cast net?" 

"Of course. " 

There was no cast net and the boy remembered when they had sold it. But they 


went through this fiction every day. There was no pot of yellow rice and fish and the 
boy knew this too. 

"Eighty-five is a lucky number, 
” 
the old man said. "How would you like to see 
me bring one in that dressed out over a thousand pounds?" 

"I'll get the cast net and go for sardines. Will you sit in the sun in the doorway?" 

"Yes. I have yesterday's paper and I will read the baseball. " 

The boy did not know whether yesterday's paper was a fiction too. But the old 
man brought it out from under the bed. 

"Perico gave it to me at the bodega, " he explained. (bodega: a grocery store.) 

"I'll be back when I have the sardines. I'll keep yours and mine together on ice 
and we can share them in the morning. When I come back you can tell me about the 
baseball. "(the baseball: The old man supports the Yankees of the American League.) 

"The Yankees cannot lose. " 

"But I fear the Indians of Cleveland. " 

"Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio. " (the great 
DiMaggio: Joe DiMaggio, a fisherman’s son, outfielder with the Yankees from 1936 to 1951.) 

"I fear both the Tigers of Detroit and the Indians of Cleveland. 

"Be careful or you will fear even the Reds of Cincinnati and the White Sox of 
Chicago. " 

"You study it and tell me when I come back. " 

"Do you think we should buy a terminal of the lottery with an eighty-five? 
Tomorrow is the eighty-fifth day. "(a terminal of the lottery: Lottery tickets of various kinds are sold 
openly in the Caribbean. Perhaps the old man refers to the last two digits of a longer number.) 

"We can do that, 
” 
the boy said. "But what about the eighty-seven of your great 
record?" 

"It could not happen twice. Do you think you can find an eighty-five?" 

"I can order one. " 

"One sheet. That's two dollars and a half. Who can we borrow that from?" 

"That's easy. I can always borrow two dollars and a half. " 

"I think perhaps I can too. But I try not to borrow. First you borrow. Then you 
beg. " 

"Keep warm old man,” the boy said. "Remember we are in September. " 

"The month when the great fish come, 
” 
the old man said. "Anyone can be a 
fisherman in May. " 

"I go now for the sardines, "the boy said. 
When the boy came back the old man was asleep in the chair and the sun was 
down. The boy took the old army blanket off the bed and spread it over the back of 
the chair and over the old man's shoulders. They were strange shoulders, still 
powerful although very old, and the neck was still strong too and the creases did not 
show so much when the old man was asleep and his head fallen forward. His shirt had 
been patched so many times that it was like the sail and the patches were faded to 
many different shades by the sun. The old man's head was very old though and with 
his eyes closed there was no life in his face. The newspaper lay across his knees and 
the weight of his arm held it there in the evening breeze. He was barefooted. 


The boy left him there and when he came back the old man was still asleep. 

"Wake up old man, 
” 
the boy said and put his hand on one of the old man's knees. 

The old man opened his eyes and for a moment he was coming back from a long 
way away. Then he smiled. 

"What have you got? " he asked. 

"Supper,” said the boy. "We're going to have supper. " 

"I'm not very hungry. " 

"Come on and eat. You can't fish and not eat. " 

"I have, 
” 
the old man said getting up and taking the newspaper and folding it. 
Then he started to fold the blanket. 

"Keep the blanket around you, 
” 
the boy said. You'll not fish without eating while 
I'm alive. " 

“Then live a long time and take care of yourself, "the old man said. "What are we 
eating?" 

“Black beans and rice, fried bananas, and some stew. "(black beans and rice, fried bananas: 
staple foods of the Caribbean islands.) 

The boy had brought them in a two-decker metal container from the Terrace . The 
two sets of knives and forks and spoons were in his pocket with a paper - napkin 
wrapped around each set. 

"Who gave this to you?" 

"Martin. The owner. " 

"I must thank him. " 

" I thanked him already," the boy said. " You don't need to thank him. " 

"I'll give him the belly meat of a big fish, 
” 
the old man said . "' Has he done this 
for us more than once?" 

"I think so. " 

"I must give him something more than the belly meat then. He is very thoughtful 
for us. " 

"He sent two beers. " 

"I like the beer in cans best. " 

"I know. But this is in bottles, Hatuey beer, and I take back the bottles. " 

"That's very kind of you, 
” 
the old man said. "Should we eat?" 

"I've been asking you to, 
” 
the boy told him gently. "I have not wished to open the 
container until you were ready. " 

"I'm ready now, 
” 
the old man said. "I only needed time to wash. " 

Where did you wash? The boy thought. The village water supply was two streets 
down the road. I must have water here for him, the boy thought, and soap and a good 
towel. Why am I so thoughtless? I must get him another shirt and a jacket for the 
winter and some sort of shoes and another blanket. (the village water supply: a community tap or 
well.) 

"Your stew is excellent, "the old man said. 

"Tell me about the baseball, "The boy asked him. 

"In the American League it is the Yankees as I said, "the old man said happily. 

"They lost today, "the boy told him. 


"That means nothing. The great DiMaggio is himself again. " 

"They have other men on the team. " 

"Naturally. But he makes the difference. In the other league, between Brooklyn 
and Philadelphia I must take Brooklyn. But then I think of Dick Sisler and those great 
drives in the old park. "(the other league: the National League, to which the Brooklyn Dodgers and the 
Philadelphia Phillies belonged.)(Dick Sisler: player for Philadelphia from 1948 to 1951 and for other teams before 
and after these years(His father, George Sisler, was a well-known player for St.Louis and Boston.) 

"There was nothing ever like them. He hits the longtest ball I have ever seen. " 

"Do you remember when he used to come to the Terrace? I wanted to take him 
fishing but I was too timid to ask him. Then I asked you to ask him and you were too 
timid. " 

“I know. It was a great mistake. He might have gone with us. Then we would 
have that for all of our lives. " 

"I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing, "the old man said. "They say his 
father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand. " 

"The great Sisler's father was never poor and he, the father, was playing in the big 
leagues when he was my age. " 

"When I was your age I was before the mast on a square rigged ship that ran to 
Africa and I have seen lions on the beaches in the evening. " 

"I know. You told me. " 

"Should we talk about Africa or about baseball?" 

"Baseball I think, 
” 
the boy said. "Tell me about the great John J. McGraw. "He 
said Jota for J.(the great John J. McGraw: manager of the New York Giants from the early 1900 ’s to 1932.) 

"He used to come to the Terrace sometimes too in the older days. But he was 
rough and harsh-spoken and difficult when he was drinking. His mind was on horses 
as well as baseball. At least he carried lists of horses at all times in his pocket and 
frequently spoke the names of horses on the telephone. " 

" He was a great manager, " the boy said. " My father thinks he was the greatest. " 

"Because he came here the most times, 
” 
the old man said." If Durocher had 
continued to come here each year your father would think him the greatest 
manager."(Durocher: manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940’s and of the New York Giants from 1948 
to 1955.) 

"Who is the greatest manager, really, Luque or Mike Gonzalez?"(Luque: Adolfo Luque, 
born in Havana in 1890, played until 1935 with Boston, Cincinnati, Brooklyn, and the New York Giants. Mike 
Gonzalez: manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, 1938, 1940.) 

"I think they are equal. " 

"And the best fisherman is you. " 

"No. I know others better. " 

"Que va," the boy said. "There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But 
there is only you. "(Que va: A Spanish exclamation difficult to translate----“What does it matter?”“What of 
it?”) 

"Thank you. You make me happy. I hope no fish will come along so great that he 
will prove us wrong. " 

"There is no such fish if you are still strong as you say. " 


"I may not be as strong as I think, "the old man said. "But I know many tricks and 
I have resolution. " 

"You ought to go to bed now so that you will be fresh in the morning. I will take 
the things back to the Terrace. " 

"Good night then. I will wake you in the morning. " 

"You're my alarm clock, 
” 
the boy said. 

"Age is my alarm clock, 
” 
the old man said. "Why do old men wake so early? Is it 
to have one longer day?" 

"I don't know,” the boy said. "All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard. " 

"I can remember it, "the old man said. "I'll waken you in time. " 

"I do not like for him to waken me. It is as though I were inferior. " 

"I know. " 

"Sleep well old man. " 

The boy went out. They had eaten with no light on the table and the old man took 
off his trousers and went to bed in the dark. He rolled his trousers up to make a pillow, 
putting the newspaper inside them. He rolled himself in the blanket and slept on the 
other old newspapers that covered the springs of the bed. 

He was asleep in a short time and he dreamed of Africa when he was a boy and 
the long golden beaches and the white beaches, so white they hurt your eyes, and the 
high capes and the great brown mountains. He lived along that coast now every night 
and in his dreams he heard the surf roar and saw the native boats come riding through 
it. He smelled the tar and oakum of the deck as he slept and he smelled the smell of 
Africa that the land breeze brought at morning. 

Usually when he smelled the land breeze he woke up and dressed to go and wake 
the boy. But tonight the smell of the land breeze came very early and he knew it was 
too early in his dream and went on dreaming to see the white peaks of the Islands 
rising from the sea and then he dreamed of the different harbors and roadsteads of the 
Canary Islands. 

He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of 
great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of 
places now and of the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and 
he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, 
looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on. He 
urinated outside the shack and then went up the road to wake the boy. He was 
shivering with the morning cold. But he knew he would shiver himself warm and that 
soon he would be rowing. 

The door of the house where the boy lived was unlocked and he opened it and 
walked in quietly with his bare feet. The boy was asleep on a cot in the first room and 
the old man could see him clearly with the light that came in from the dying moon. He 
took hold of one foot gently and held it until the boy woke and turned and looked at 
him. The old man nodded and the boy took his trousers from the chair by the bed and, 
sitting on the bed, pulled them on. 

The old man went out the door and the boy came after him. He was sleepy and 
the old man put his arms across his shoulders and said,” I am sorry. " 


"Que va. "The boy said. "It is what a man must do." 

They walked down the road to the old man's shack and all along the road, in the 
dark, barefoot men were moving, carrying the masts of their boats. 

When they reached the old man's shack the boy took the rolls of line in the basket 
and the harpoon and gaff and the old man carried the mast with the furled sail on his 
shoulder. 

"Do you want coffee?” the boy asked. 

"We'll put the gear in the boat and then get some. " 

They had coffee from condensed milk cans at an early morning place that served 
fishermen. 

"How did you sleep old man? 
” 
the boy asked. He was waking up now although it 
was still hard for him to leave his sleep. 

"Very well, Manolin," the old man said. "I feel confident today. " 

"So do I, 
” 
the boy said. "Now I must get your sardines and mine and your fresh 
baits. He brings our gear himself. He never wants anyone to carry anything. " 

"We're different, 
” 
the old man said. "I let you carry things when you were five 
years old. " 

"1 know it, 
” 
the boy said. "I'll be right back. Have another coffee. We have credit 
here. " 

He walked off, barefooted on the coral rocks, to the ice house where the baits 
were stored. 

The old man drank his coffee slowly. It was all he would have all day and he 
knew that he should take it. For a long time now eating had bored him and he never 
carried a lunch. He had a bottle of water in the bow of the skiff and that was all he 
needed for the day. 

The boy was back now with the sardines and the two baits wrapped in a 
newspaper and they went down the trail to the skiff, feeling the pebbled sand under 
their feet, and lifted the skiff and slid her into the water. 

"Good luck old man. " 

"Good luck, "the old man said. He fitted the rope lashings of the oars onto the 
thole pins and, leaning forward against the thrust of the blades in the water, he began 
to row out of the harbor in the dark. There were other boats from the other beaches 
going out to sea and the old man heard the dip and push of their oars even though he 
could not see them now the moon was below the hills. 
Sometimes someone would speak in a boat. But most of the boats were silent 
except for the dip of the oars. They spread apart after they were out of the mouth of 
the harbor and each one headed for the part of the ocean where he hoped to find fish. 
The old man knew he was going far out and he left the smell of the land behind and 
rowed out into the clean early morning smell of the ocean. He saw the 
phosphorescence of the Gulf weed in the water as he rowed over the part of the ocean 
that the fishermen called the great well because there was a sudden deep of seven 
hundred fathoms where all sorts of fish congregated because of the swirl the current 
made against the steep walls of the floor of the ocean. Here there were concentrations 
of shrimp and bait and sometimes schools of squid in the deepest holes and these rose 


close to the surface at night where all the wandering fish fed on them. 

In the dark the old man could feel the morning coming and as he rowed he heard 
the trembling sound as flying fish left the water and the hissing that their stiff set 
wings made as they soared away in the darkness. He was very fond of flying fish as 
they were his principal friends on the ocean. He was sorry for the birds, especially the 
small delicate dark terns that were always flying and looking and almost never finding, 
and he thought,” The birds have a harder life than we do except for the robber birds 
and the heavy strong ones. Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea 
swallows when the ocean can be so cruel? She is kind and very beautiful. But she can 
be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with 
their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea. " 

He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish 
when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are 
always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who 
used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers 
had brought much money, spoke of her as el mar which is masculine. They spoke of 
her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of 
her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favors, and if she did 
wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her 
as it does a woman, he thought. 

He was rowing steadily and it was no effort for him since he kept well within his 
speed and the surface of the ocean was flat except for the occasional swirls of the 
current. He was letting the current do a third of the work and as it started to be light he 
saw he was already further out than he had hoped to be at this hour. 

I worked the deep wells for a week and did nothing, he thought. Today I'll work 
out where the schools of bonita and albacore are and maybe there will be a big one 
with them.(albacore: the long-finned tunny.) 

Before it was really light he had his baits out and was drifting with the current. 
One bait was down forty fathoms. The second was at seventy-five and the third and 
fourth were down in the blue water at one hundred and one hundred and twenty-five 
fathoms. Each bait hung head down with the shank of the hook inside the bait fish, 
tied and sewed solid and all the projecting part of the hook, the curve and the point, 
was covered with fresh sardines. Each sardine was hooked through both eyes so that 
they made a half-garland on the projecting steel. There was no part of the hook that a 
great fish could feel which was not sweet smelling and good tasting.(These pages provide a 
good example of Hemingway’s description from the point of view of the fisherman.) 

The boy had given him two fresh small tunas, or albacores, which hung on the 
two deepest lines like plummets and, on the others, he had a big blue runner and a 
yellow jack that had been used before; but they were in good condition still and had 
the excellent sardines to give them scent and attractiveness. Each line, as thick around 
as a big pencil, was looped onto a green-sapped stick so that any pull or touch on the 
bait would make the stick dip and each line had two forty-fathom coils which could 
be made fast to the other spare coils so that, if it were necessary, a fish could take out 
over three hundred fathoms of line. 


Now the man watched the dip of the three sticks over the side of the skiff and 
rowed gently to keep the lines straight up and down and at their proper depths. It was 
quite light and any moment now the sun would rise. 

The sun rose thinly from the sea and the old man could see the other boats, low 
on the water and well in toward the shore, spread out across the current. Then the sun 
was brighter and the glare came on the water and then, as it rose clear, the flat sea sent 
it back at his eyes so that it hurt sharply and he rowed without looking into it. He 
looked down into the water and watched the lines that went straight down into the 
dark of the water. He kept them straighter than anyone did, so that at each level in 
the darkness of the stream there would be a bait waiting exactly where he wished 
it to be for any fish that swam there. Others let them drift with the current and 
sometimes they were at sixty fathoms when the fishermen thought they were at a 
hundred. 

But, he thought, I keep them with precision. Only I have no luck any more. 
But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But 
I would rather be exact. (This is a favorite theme with Hemingway.) Then when luck comes 
you are ready. 

The sun was two hours higher now and it did not hurt his eyes so much to look 
into the east. There were only three boats in sight now and they showed very low 
and far inshore. 

All my life the early sun has hurt my eyes, he thought. Yet they are still good. 
In the evening I can look straight into it without getting the blackness. It has more 
force in the evening too. But in the morning it is painful. 

Just then he saw a man-of-war bird with his long black wings circling in the 
sky ahead of him. He made a quick drop, slanting down on his backswept wings, 
and then circled again.(man-of-war bird: a bird with a great wingspread, also called frigate bird, it roams 
the tropical seas, snatching fish and robbing smaller birds.) 

"He's got something, "the old man said aloud. 

"He's not just looking. " 

He rowed slowly and steadily toward where the bird was circling. He did not 
hurry and he kept his lines straight up and down. But he crowded the current a 
little so that he was still fishing correctly though faster than he would have fished 
if he was not trying to use the bird. 

The bird went higher in the air and circled again, his wings motionless. Then 
he dove suddenly and the old man saw flying fish spurt out of the water and sail 
desperately over the surface. 

"Dolphin," the old man said aloud. "Big dolphin. " 

He shipped his oars and brought a small line from under the bow. It had a wire 
leader and a medium-sized hook and he baited it with one of the sardines. He let it 
go over the side and then made it fast to a ring bolt in the stern. Then he baited 
another line and left it coiled in the shade of the bow. He went back to rowing and 
to watching the longwinged black bird who was working, now, low over the water. 

As he watched the bird dipped again slanting his wings for the dive and then 
swinging them wildly and ineffectually as he followed the flying fish. The old man 


could see the slight bulge in the water that the big dolphin raised as they followed 
the escaping fish. The dolphin were cutting through the water below the flight of the 
fish and would be in the water, driving at speed, when the fish dropped. It is a big 
school of dolphin, he thought. They are wide spread and the flying fish have little 
chance. The bird has no chance. The flying fish are too big for him and they go too 
fast. 

He watched the flying fish burst out again and again and the ineffectual 
movements of the bird. That school has gotten away from me, he thought. They are 
moving out too fast and too far. But perhaps I will pick up a stray and perhaps my big 
fish is around them. My big fish must be somewhere. 

The clouds over the land now rose like mountains and the coast was only a long 
green line with the gray blue hills behind it. The water was a dark blue now, so dark 
that it was almost purple. As he looked down into it he saw the red sifting of the 
plankton in the dark water and the strange light the sun made now. He watched his 
lines to see them go straight down out of sight into the water and he was happy to see 
so much plankton because it meant fish. The strange light the sun made in the water, 
now that the sun was higher, meant good weather and so did the shape of the clouds 
over the land. But the bird was almost out of sight now and nothing showed on the 
surface of the water but some patches of yellow, sun-bleached Sargasso weed and the 
purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war floating 
close beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully 
as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a yard behind it in the 
water.(Portuguese man-of-war: a type of jellyfish.) 

"Agua mala, "the man said. "You whore. " From where he swung lightly against 
his oars he looked down into the water and saw the tiny fish that were colored like the 
trailing filaments and swam between them and under the small shade the bubble made 
as it drifted. They were immune to its poison. But men were not and when some of 
the filaments would catch on a line and rest there slimy and purple while the old man 
was working a fish, he would have welts and sores on his arms and hands of the sort 
that poison ivy or poison oak can give. But these poisonings from the agua mala came 
quickly and struck like a whiplash.(agua mala: a fisherman’s exclamation; literally bad water.) 

The iridescent bubbles were beautiful. But they were the falsest thing in the sea 
and the old man loved' to see the big sea turtles eating them. The turtles saw them, 
approached them from the front, then shut their eyes so they were completely 
carapaced and ate them filaments and all. The old man loved to see the turtles eat 
them and he loved to walk on them on the beach after a storm and hear them pop 
when he stepped on them with the horny soles of his feet.(carapaced: protected by the hard 
upper shell.) 

He loved green turtles and hawks-bills with their elegance and speed and their 
great value and he had a friendly contempt for the huge, stupid loggerheads, yellow in 
their armor-plating, strange in their love-making, and happily eating the Portuguese 
men-of-war with their eyes shut. 

He had no mysticism about turtles although he had gone in turtle boats for many 
years. He was sorry for them all, even the great trunk backs that were as long as the 


skiff and weighed a ton. Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart 
will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I 
have such a heart too and my feet and hands are like theirs. He ate the white eggs to 
give himself strength. He ate them all through May to be strong in September and 
October for the truly big fish. 

He also drank a cup of shark liver oil each day from the big drum in the shack 
where many of the fishermen kept their gear. It was there for all fishermen who 
wanted it. Most fishermen hated the taste. But it was no worse than getting up at the 
hours that they rose and it was very good against all colds and grippes and it was good 
for the eyes. 

Now the old man looked up and saw that the bird was circling again. 

"He's found fish,” he said aloud. No flying fish broke the surface and there was 
no scattering of bait fish. But as the old man watched, a small tuna rose in the air, 
turned and dropped head first into the water. The tuna shone silver in the sun and after 
he had dropped back into the water another and another rose and they were jumping 
in all directions, churning the water and leaping in long jumps after the bait. They 
were circling it and driving it. 

If they don't travel too fast I will get into them, the old man thought, and he 
watched the school working the water white and the bird now dropping and dipping 
into the bait fish that were forced to the surface in their panic. 

"The bird is a great help, 
” 
the old man said. Just then the stern line came taut 
under his foot, where he had kept a loop of the line, and he dropped his oars and felt 
the weight of the small tuna's shivering pull as he held the line firm and commenced 
to haul it in. The shivering increased as he pulled in and he could see the blue back of 
the fish in the water and the gold of his sides before he swung him over the side and 
into the boat. He lay in the stern in the sun, compact and bullet shaped, his big, 
unintelligent eyes staring as he thumped his life out against the planking of the boat 
with the quick shivering strokes of his neat, fast-moving tail. The old man hit him on 
the head for kindness and kicked him, his body still shuddering, under the shade of 
the stern. 

"Albacore, "he said aloud. "He'll make a beautiful bait. He'll weigh ten pounds. " 

He did not remember when he had first started to talk aloud when he was by 
himself. He had sung when he was by himself in the old days and he had sung at night 
sometimes when he was alone steering on his watch in the smacks or in the turtle 
boats. He had probably started to talk aloud, when alone, when the boy had left. But 
he did not remember. When he and the boy fished together they usually spoke only 
when it was necessary. They talked at night or when they were stormbound by bad 
weather. It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea and the old man 
had always considered it so and respected it. But now he said his thoughts aloud many 
times since there was no one that they could annoy. 

"If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy, "he said 
aloud. "But since I am not crazy, I do not care. And the rich have radios to talk to 
them in their boats and to bring them the baseball. " 

Now is no time to think of baseball, he thought. Now is the time to think of only 


one thing. That which I was born for. There might be a big one around that school, he 
thought. I picked up only a straggler from the albacore that were feeding. But they are 
working far out and fast. Everything that shows on the surface today travels very fast 
and to the northeast. Can that be the time of day? Or is it some sign of weather that I 
do not know? 

He could not see the green of the shore now but only the tops of the blue hills that 
showed white as though they were snow-capped and the clouds that looked like high 
snow mountains above them. The sea was very dark and the light made prisms in the 
water. The myriad flecks of the plankton were annnulled now by the high sun and it 
was only the great deep prisms m the blue water that the old man saw now with his 
lines going straight down into the water that was a mile deep. 

The tuna, the fishermen called all the fish of that species tuna and only 
distinguished among them by their proper names when they came to sell them or to 
trade them for baits, were down again. The sun was hot now and the old man felt it on 
the back of his neck and felt the sweat trickle down his back as he rowed. 

I could just drift, he thought, and sleep and put a bight of line around my toe to 
wake me. But today is eighty-five days and I should fish the day well. 

Just then, watching his lines, he saw one of the projecting green sticks dip 
sharply. 

"Yes,” he said. "Yes, 
” 
and shipped his oars without bumping the boat. He reached 
out for the line and held it softly between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. 
He felt no strain nor weight and he held the line lightly. Then it came again. This time 
it was a tentative pull, not solid nor heavy, and he knew exactly what it was. One 
hundred fathoms down a marlin was eating the sardines that covered the point and the 
shank of the hook where the hand-forged hook projected from the head of the small 
tuna. 

The old man held the line delicately, and softly, with his left hand, unleashed it 
from the stick. Now he could let it run through his fingers without the fish feeling any 
tension. 

This far out, he must be huge in this month, he thought. Eat them, fish. Eat them. 
Please eat them. How fresh they are and you down there six hundred feet in that cold 
water in the dark. Make another turn in the dark and come back and eat them. 

He felt the light delicate pulling and then a harder pull when a sardine's head 
must have been more difficult to break from the hook. Then there was nothing. 

"Come on,” the old man said aloud. "Make another turn. Just smell them. Aren't 
they lovely? Eat them good now and then there is the tuna. Hard and cold and lovely. 
Don't be shy, fish. Eat them. " 

He waited with the line between his thumb and his finger, watching it and the 
other lines at the same time for the fish might have swum up or down. Then came the 
same delicate pulling touch again. 

"He'll take it,” the old man said aloud. "God help him to take it. " 

He did not take it though. He was gone and the old man felt nothing. 

"He can't have gone,” he said. "Christ knows he can’t have gone. He's making a 
turn. Maybe he has been hooked before and he remembers something of it." 


Then he felt the gentle touch on the line and he was happy. 

"It was only his turn, 
” 
he said. "He'll take it. " 

He was happy feeling the gentle pulling and then he felt something hard and 
unbelievably heavy. It was the weight of the fish and he let the line slip down, down, 
down, unrolling off the first of the two reserve coils. As it went down, slipping lightly 
through the old man's fingers, he still could feel the great weight, though the pressure 
of his thumb and finger were almost imperceptible. 

"What a fish,” he said. "He has it sideways in his mouth now and he is moving 
off with it. " 

Then he will turn and swallow it, he thought. He did not say that because he knew 
that if you said a good thing it might not happen. He knew what a huge fish this was 
and he thought of him moving away in the darkness with the tuna held crosswise in 
his mouth. At that moment he felt him stop moving but the weight was still there. 
Then the weight increased and he gave more line. He tightened the pressure of his 
thumb and finger for a moment and the weight increased and was going straight 
down. 

''He's taken it, 
” 
he said. "Now I'll let him eat it well. " 

He let the line slip through his fingers while he reached down with his left hand 
and made fast the free end of the two reserve coils to the loop of the two reserve coils 
of the next line. Now he was ready. He had three forty-fathom coils of line in reserve 
now, as well as the coil he was using. 

"Eat it a little more,” he said. "Eat it well. " 

Eat it so that the point of the hook goes into your heart and kills you, he thought, 
Come up easy and let me put the harpoon into you. All right. Are you ready? Have 
you been long enough at table? 

"Now! "He said aloud and struck hard with both hands, gained a yard of line and 
then struck again and again, swinging with each arm alternately on the cord with all 
the strength of his arms and the pivoted weight of his body. 

Nothing happened. The fish just moved away slowly and the old man could not 
raise him an inch. His line was strong and made for heavy fish and he held it against 
his back until it was so taut that beads of water were jumping from it. Then it began to 
make a slow hissing sound in the water and he still held it, bracing himself against the 
thwart and leaning back against the pull. The boat began to move slowly off toward 
the northwest. 

The fish moved steadily and they travelled slowly on the calm water. The other 
baits were still in the water but there was nothing to be done. 

"I wish I had the boy,” the old man said aloud. "I'm being towed by a fish and I'm 
the towing bitt. I could make the line fast. But then he could break it. I must hold him 
all I can and give him line when he must have it. Thank God he is travelling and not 
going down. "(the towing bitt: a post fastened in the deck to hold a cable or rope.) 

What I will do if he decides to go down, I don't know. What I'll do if he sounds 
and dies I don't know. But I'll do something. There are plenty of things I can do. 

He held the line against his back and watched its slant in the water and the skiff 
moving steadily to the northwest. 


This will kill him, the old man thought. He can't do this forever. But four hours 
later the fish was still swimming steadily out to sea, towing the skiff, and the old man 
was still braced solidly with the line across his back. 

"It was noon when I hooked him, 
” 
he said. "And I have never seen him. " 

He had pushed his straw hat hard down on his head before he hooked the fish and 
it was cutting his forehead. He was thirsty too and he got down on his knees and, 
being careful not to jerk on the line, moved as far into the bow as he could get and 
reached the water bottle with one hand. He opened it and drank a little. Then he rested 
against the bow. He rested sitting on the unstepped mast and sail and tried not to think 
but only to endure.(the unstepped mast and sail: the sail and mast that had been removed from the step, 
which is the socket, frame, or platform for supporting the lower end of a mast. Notice how the passing of time is 
suggested.) 

Then he looked behind him and saw that no land was visible. That makes no 
difference, he thought. I can always come in on the glow from Havana. There are two 
more hours before the sun sets and maybe he will come up before that. If he doesn't 
maybe he will come up with the moon. If he does not do that maybe he will come up 
with the sunrise. I have no cramps and I feel strong. It is he that has the hook in his 
mouth. But what a fish to pull like that. He must have his mouth shut tight on the wire. 
I wish I could see him. I wish I could see him only once to know what I have against 
me. 

The fish never changed his course nor his direction all that night as far as the man 
could tell from watching the stars. It was cold after the sun went down and the old 
man's sweat dried cold on his back and his arms and his old legs. During the day he 
had taken the sack that covered the bait box and spread it in the sun to dry. After the 
sun went down he tied it around his neck so that it hung down over his back and he 
cautiously worked it down under the line that was across his shoulders now. The sack 
cushioned the line and he had found a way of leaning forward against the bow so that 
he was almost comfortable. The position actually was only somewhat less intolerable; 
but he thought of it as almost comfortable. 

I can do nothing with him and he can do nothing with me, he thought. Not as long 
as he keeps this up. 

Once he stood up and urinated over the side of the skiff and looked at the stars 
and checked his course. The line showed like a phosphorescent streak in the water 
straight out from his shoulders. They were moving more slowly now and the glow of 
Havana was not so strong, so that he knew the current must be carrying them to the 
eastward. If I lose the glare of Havana we must be going more to the eastward, he 
thought. For if the fish's course held true I must see it for many more hours. I wonder 
how the baseball came out in the grand leagues today, he thought. It would be 
wonderful to do this with a radio. Then he thought, think of it always. Think of what 
you are doing. You must do nothing stupid. 

Then he said aloud," I wish I had the boy. To help me and to see this. " 
No one should be alone in their old age, he thought. But it is unavoidable. I must 
remember to eat the tuna before he spoils in order to keep strong. Remember, no 
matter how little you want to, that you must eat him in the morning. Remember, he 


said to himself. 

During the night two porpoise came around the boat and he could hear them 
rolling and blowing. He could tell the difference between the blowing noise the male 
made and the sighing blow of the female. 

"They are good," he said. "They play and make jokes and love one another. They 
are our brothers like the flying fish. " 

Then he began to pity the great fish that he had hooked. He is wonderful and 
strange and who knows how old he is, he thought. Never have I had such a strong fish 
nor one who acted so strangely. Perhaps he is too wise to jump. He could ruin me by 
jumping or by a wild rush. But perhaps he has been hooked many times before and he 
knows that this is how he should make his fight. He cannot know that it is only one 
man against him, nor that it is an old man. But what a great fish he is and what he will 
bring in the market if the flesh is good. He took the bait like a male and he pulls like a 
male and his fight has no panic in it. I wonder if he has any plans or if he is just as 
desperate as I am?(This example of fidelity should be noted. Immediately afterward, the theme of treachery 
is introduced.) 

He remembered the time he had hooked one of a pair of marlin. The male fish 
always let the female fish feed first and the hooked fish, the female, made a wild, 
panic-stricken, despairing fight that soon exhausted her, and all the time the male 
had stayed with her, crossing the line and circling with her on the surface. He had 
stayed so close that the old man was afraid he would cut the line with his tail 
which was sharp as a scythe and almost of that size and shape. When the old man 
had gaffed her and clubbed her, holding the rapier bill with its sandpaper edge and 
clubbing her across the top of her head until her color turned to a color almost like 
the backing of mirrors, and then, with the boy's aid, hoisted her aboard, the male 
fish had stayed by the side of the boat. Then, while the old man was clearing the 
lines and preparing the harpoon, the male fish jumped high into the air beside the 
boat to see where the female was and then went down deep, his lavender wings, 
that were his pectoral fins, spread wide and all his wide lavender stripes showing. 
He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed. 

That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought. The 
boy was sad too and we begged her pardon and butchered her promptly. 

"I wish the boy was here, 
” 
he said aloud and settled himself against the 
rounded planks of the bow and felt the strength of the great fish through the line he 
held across his shoulders moving steadily toward whatever he had chosen. 

When once, through my treachery, it had been necessary to him to make a 
choice, the old man thought. 

His choice had been to stay in the deep dark water far out beyond all snares 
and traps and treacheries. My choice was to go there to find him beyond all people. 
Beyond all people in the world. Now we are joined together and have been since 
noon. And no one to help either one of us. 

Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing 
that I was born for. I must surely remember to eat the tuna after it gets light. 

Some time before daylight something took one of the baits that were behind 


him. He heard the stick break and the line begin to rush out over the gunwale of 
the skiff. In the darkness he loosened his sheath knife and taking all the strain of 
the fish on his left shoulder he leaned back and cut the line against the wood of the 
gunwale. Then he cut the other line closest to him and in the dark made the loose ends 
of the reserve coils fast. He worked skillfully with the one hand and put his foot on 
the coils to hold them as he drew his knots tight. Now he had six reserve coils of line. 
There were two from each bait he had severed and the two from the bait the fish had 
taken and they were all connected. 

After it is light, he thought, I will work back to the forty-fathom bait and cut it 
away too and link up the reserve coils. I will have lost two hundred fathoms of good 
Catalan cordel and the hooks and leaders. That can be replaced. But who replaces this 
fish if I hook some fish and it cuts him off? I don't know what that fish was that took 
the bait just now. It could have been a marlin or a broadbill or a shark. I never felt him. 
I had to get rid of him too fast. 

Aloud he said,” I wish I had the boy. " 

But you haven't got the boy, he thought. You have only yourself and you had 
better work back to the last line now, in the dark or not in the dark, and cut it away 
and hook up the two reserve coils. 

So he did it. It was difficult in the dark and once the fish made a surge that pulled 
him down on his face and made a cut below his eye. The blood ran down his cheek a 
little way. But it coagulated and dried before it reached his chin and he worked his 
way back to the bow and rested against the wood. He adjusted the sack and carefully 
worked the line so that it came across a new part of his shoulders and, holding it 
anchored with his shoulders, he carefully felt the pull of the fish and then felt with his 
hand the progress of the skiff through the water. 

I wonder what he made that lurch for, he thought. The wire must have slipped on 
the hill of his back. Certainly his back cannot feel as badly as mine does. But he 
cannot pull this skiff forever, no matter how great he is. Now everything is cleared 
away that might make trouble and I have a big reserve of line; all that a man can ask. 

"Fish, 
” 
he said softly, aloud, “I’ll stay with you until I am dead. " 

He'll stay with me too, I suppose, the old man thought and he waited for it to be 
light. It was cold now in the time before daylight and he pushed against the wood to 
be warm. I can do it as long as he can, he thought. And in the first light the line 
extended out and down into the water. The boat moved steadily and when the first 
edge of the sun rose it was on the old man's right shoulder. 

"He's headed north, 
” 
the old man said. The current will have set us far to the 
eastward, he thought. I wish he would turn with the current. That would show that he 
was tiring. 

When the sun had risen further the old man realized that the fish was not tiring. 
There was only one favorable sign. The slant of the line showed he was swimming at 
a lesser depth. That did not necessarily mean that he would jump. But he might. 

"God let him jump, 
” 
the old man said. "I have enough line to handle him. " 

Maybe if I can increase the tension just a little it will hurt him and he will jump, 
he thought. Now that it is daylight let him jump so that he'll fill the sacks along his 


backbone with air and then he cannot go deep to die. 

He tried to increase the tension, but the line had been taut up to the very edge of 
the breaking point since he had hooked the fish and he felt the harshness as he leaned 
back to pull and knew he could put no more strain on it. I must not jerk it ever, he 
thought. Each jerk widens the cut the hook makes and then when he does jump he 
might throw it. Anyway I feel better with the sun and for once I do not have to look 
into it. 

There was yellow weed on the line but the old man knew that only made an 
added drag and he was pleased. It was the yellow Gulf weed that had made so much 
phosphorescence in the night. 

"Fish, 
” 
he said, “I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead 
before this day ends. " 

Let us hope so, he thought. 

A small bird came toward the skiff from the north. He was a warbler and flying 
very low over the water. The old man could see that he was very tired. 

The bird made the stern of the boat and rested there. Then he flew around the old 
man's head and rested on the line where he was more comfortable. 

"How old are you? 
” 
the old man asked the bird. "Is this your first trip?" 

The bird looked at him when he spoke. He was too tired even to examine the line 
and he teetered on it as his delicate feet gripped it fast. 

"It's steady,” the old man told him. "It's too steady. You shouldn't be that tired 
after a windless night. What are birds coming to?" 

The hawks, he thought, that come out to sea to meet them. But he said nothing of 
this to the bird who could not understand him anyway and who would learn about the 
hawks soon enough. 

"Take a good rest, small bird,” he said. "Then go in and take your chance like any 
man or bird or fish. " 

It encouraged him to talk because his back had stiffened in the night and it hurt 
truly now. 

"Stay at my house if you like, bird, 
” 
he said. "I am sorry I cannot hoist the sail 
and take you in with the small breeze that is rising. But I am with a friend. " 

Just then the fish gave a sudden lurch that pulled the old man down onto the bow 
and would have pulled him overboard if he had not braced himself and given some 
line. 

The bird had flown up when the line jerked and the old man had not even seen 
him go. He felt the line carefully with his right hand and noticed his hand was 
bleeding. 

"Something hurt him then,” he said aloud and pulled back on the line to see if he 
could turn the fish. But when he was touching the breaking point he held steady and 
settled back against the strain of the line. 

"You're feeling it now, fish, 
” 
he said. "And so, God knows, am I. " 

He looked around for the bird now because he would have liked him for company. 
The bird was gone. 

You did not stay long, the man thought. But it is rougher where you are going 


until you make the shore. How did I let the fish cut me with that one quick pull he 
made? I must be getting very stupid. Or perhaps I was looking at the small bird and 
thinking of him. Now I will pay attention to my work and then I must eat the tuna so 
that I will not have a failure of strength. 

"I wish the boy were here and that I had some salt, "he said aloud. 

Shifting the weight of the line to his left shoulder and kneeling carefully he 
washed his hand in the ocean and held it there, submerged, for more than a minute 
watching the blood trail away and the steady movement of the water against his hand 
as the boat moved. 

"He has slowed much, "he said. 

The old man would have liked to keep his hand in the salt water longer but he 
was afraid of another sudden lurch by the fish and he stood up and braced himself and 
held his hand up against the sun. It was only a line burn that had cut his flesh. But it 
was in the working part of his hand. He knew he would need his hands before this was 
over and he did not like to be cut before it started. " Now," he said, when his hand 
had dried, " I must eat the small tuna. I can reach him with the gaff and eat him 
here in comfort. " 

He knelt down and found the tuna under the stern with the gaff and drew it 
toward him keeping it clear of the coiled lines. Holding the line with his left 
shoulder again, and bracing on his left hand and arm, he took the tuna off the gaff 
hook and put the gaff back in place. He put one knee on the fish and cut strips of 
dark red meat longitudinally from the back of the head to the tail. They were 
wedge-shaped strips and he cut them from next to the backbone down to the edge 
of the belly. When he had cut six strips he spread them out on the wood of the bow, 
wiped his knife on his trousers, and lifted the carcass of the bonito by the tail and 
dropped it overboard. 

"I don't think I can eat an entire one,” he said and drew his knife across one of 
the strips. He could feel the steady hard pull of the line and his left hand was 
cramped. It drew up tight on the heavy cord and he looked at it in disgust. 

"What kind of a hand is that,” he said. "Cramp then if you want. Make 
yourself into a claw. It will do you no good. " 

Come on, he thought and looked down into the dark water at the slant of the 
line. Eat it now and it will strengthen the hand. It is not the hand's fault and you 
have been many hours with the fish. But you can stay with him forever. Eat the 
bonito now. 

He picked up a piece and put it in his mouth and chewed it slowly. It was not 
unpleasant. 

Chew it well, he thought, and get all the juices. It would not be bad to eat with 
a little lime or with lemon or with salt. 

"How do you feel, hand? 
” 
he asked the cramped hand that was almost as stiff 
as rigor mortis. "I'll eat some more for you. " 

He ate the other part of the piece that he had cut in two. He chewed it carefully 
and then spat out the skin. 

"How does it go, hand? Or is it too early to know?" 


He took another full piece and chewed it. 

"It is a strong full-blooded fish, 
” 
he thought. "I was lucky to get him instead of 
dolphin. Dolphin is too sweet. This is hardly sweet at all and all the strength is still 
in it. " 

There is no sense in being anything but practical though, he thought. I wish I 
had some salt. And I do not know whether the sun will rot or dry what is left, so I 
had better eat it all although I am not hungry. The fish is calm and steady. I will eat it 
all and then I will be ready. 

"Be patient, hand, 
” 
he said, “I do this for you. " 

I wish I could feed the fish, he thought. He is my brother. But I must kill him and 
keep strong to do it. Slowly and conscientiously he ate all of the wedge-shaped strips 
of fish. 

He straightened up, wiping his hand on his trousers. 

"Now, "he said. "You can let the cord go, hand, and I will handle him with the 
right arm alone until you stop that nonsense. "He put his left foot on the heavy line 
that the left hand had held and lay back against the pull against his back. 

“God help me to have the cramp go, 
” 
he said. "Because I do not know what the 
fish is going to do. " 

But he seems calm, he thought, and following his plan. But what is his plan, he 
thought. And what is mine? Mine I must improvise to his because of his great size. If 
he will jump I can kill him. But he stays down forever. Then I will stay down with 
him forever. 

He rubbed the cramped hand against his trousers and tried to gentle the fingers. 
But it would not open. 

Maybe it will open with the sun, he thought, Maybe it will open when the strong 
raw tuna is digested. If I have to have it, I will open it, cost whatever it costs. But I do 
not want to open it now by force. Let it open by itself and come back of its own 
accord. After all I abused it much in the night when it is necessary to free and unite 
the various lines. 

He looked across the sea and knew how alone he was now. But he could see the 
prisms in the deep dark water and the line stretching ahead and the strange undulation 
of the calm. The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead 
and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then 
blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea. 

He thought of how some men feared being out of sight of land in a small boat and 
knew they were right in the months of sudden bad weather. But now they were in 
hurricane months and, when there are no hurricanes, the weather of hurricane months 
is the best of all the year. 

If there is a hurricane you always see the signs of it in the sky for days ahead, if 
you are at sea. They do not see it ashore because they do not know what to look for, 
he thought. The land must make a difference too, in the shape of the clouds. But we 
have no hurricane coming now. 

He looked at the sky and saw the white cumulus built like friendly piles of ice 
cream and high above were the thin feathers of the cirrus against the high 


September sky. 

"Light brisa," he said. "Better weather for me than for you, fish. "(brisa: breeze.) 

His left hand was still cramped, but he was unknotting it slowly. 

I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one's own body. It is 
humiliating before others to have a diarrhoea from ptomaine poisoning or to vomit 
from it. But a cramp, he thought of it as a calambre, humiliates oneself especially 
when one is alone.(The distinction between humiliation, a form of treachery, and humility, a form of 
triumph, is important.) 

If the boy were here he could rub it for me and loosen it down from the 
forearm, he thought. But it will loosen up. 

Then, with his right hand he felt the difference in the pull of the line before he 
saw the slant change in the water. Then, as he leaned against the line and slapped 
his left hand hard and fast against his thigh he saw the line slanting slowly upward. 

"He's coming up,” he said. ."Come on hand. Please come on. 
” 

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 sides 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. 

"He is two feet longer than the skiff, "the old man said. The line was going out 
fast but steadily and the fish was not panicked. The old man was trying with both 
hands to keep the line just inside of breaking strength. He knew that if he could 
not slow the fish with a steady pressure the fish could take out all the line and 
break it. 

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. 
The old man had seen many great fish. He had seen many that weighed more than a 
thousand pounds and he had caught two of that size in his life, but never alone. Now 
alone, and out of sight of land, he was fast to the biggest fish that he had ever seen 
and bigger than he had ever heard of, and his left hand was still as tight as the gripped 
claws of an eagle.(I must convince him: the word convince is used perhaps with two meanings, persuade and 
conquer.) 

(At this point in the story the odds in the conflict are stated.) 

It will uncramp though, he thought. Surely it will uncramp to help my right hand. 
There are three things that are brothers: the fish and my two hands. It must uncramp. 
It is unworthy of it to be cramped. The fish had slowed again and was going at his 
usual pace. 

I wonder why he jumped, the old man thought. He jumped almost as though to 
show me how big he was. I know now, anyway, he thought. I wish I could show him 
what sort of man I am. But then he would see the cramped hand. Let him think I am 


more man than I am and I will be so. I wish I was the fish, he thought, with everything 
he has against only my will and my intelligence. 

He settled comfortably against the wood and took his suffering as it came and the 
fish swam steadily and the boat moved slowly through the dark water. There was a 
small sea rising with the wind coming up from the east and at noon the old man's left 
hand was uncramped. 

"Bad news for you fish, "he said and shifted the line over the sacks that covered 
his shoulders. 

He was comfortable but suffering, although he did not admit the suffering at all. 
"I am not religious, "he said. "But I will say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys that I 
should catch this fish, and I promise to make a pilgrimage to the Virgin de Cobre if I 
catch him. That is a promise. " 

He commenced to say his prayers mechanically. Sometimes he would be so tired 
that he could not remember the prayer and then he would say them fast so that they 
would come automatically. Hail Marys are easier to say than Our Fathers, he thought. 
"Hail Mary full of Grace the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and 
blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary. Mother of God, pray for us sinners 
now and at the hour of our death. Amen. "Then he added, “Blessed Virgin, pray for 
the death of this fish. Wonderful though he is. " 

With his prayers said, and feeling much better, but suffering exactly as much, and 
perhaps a little more, he leaned against the wood of the bow and began, mechanically, 
to work the fingers of his left hand. The sun was hot now although the breeze was 
rising gently. 

"I had better re-bait that little line out over the stern,” he said. "If the fish 
decides to stay another night I will need to eat again and the water is low in the 
bottle. I don't think I can get anything but a dolphin here. But if I eat him fresh 
enough he won't be bad. I wish a flying fish would come on board tonight. But I 
have no light to attract them. A flying fish is excellent to eat raw and I would not 
have to cut him up. I must save all my strength now. Christ, I did not know he was 
so big. " 

"I'll kill him though,” he said. "In all his greatness and his glory. " 
Although it is unjust, he thought. But I will show him what a man can do and 
what a man endures. 
"I told the boy I was a strange old man, 
” 
he said. "Now is when I must prove it. 
" 

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. 

(The idea of a man’s proving himself over and over again is found in many of Hemingway’s books.) 

I wish he'd sleep and I could sleep and dream about the lions, he thought. Why 
are the lions the main thing that is left? Don’t think, old man, he said to himself. 
Rest gently now against the wood and think of nothing. He is working. Work as 
little as you can. 

It was getting into the afternoon and the boat still moved slowly and steadily. 


But there was an added drag now from the easterly breeze and the old man rode 
gently with the small sea and the hurt of the cord across his back came to him 
easily and smoothly. 

Once in the afternoon the line started to rise again. But the fish only continued 
to swim at a slightly higher level. The sun was on the old man's left arm and 
shoulder and on his back. So he knew the fish had turned east of north. 

Now that he had seen him once, he could picture the fish swimming in the 
water with his purple pectoral fins set wide as wings and the great erect tail slicing 
through the dark. I wonder how much he sees at that depth, the old man thought. 
His eye is huge and a horse, with much less eye, can see in the dark. Once I could 
see quite well in the dark. Not in the absolute dark. But almost as a cat sees. 

The sun and his steady movement of his fingers had uncramped his left hand 
now completely and he began to shift more of the strain to it and he shrugged the 
muscles of his back to shift the hurt of the cord a little. "If you're not tired, fish,” he 
said aloud, "you must be very strange. " 

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He felt very tired now and he knew the night would come soon and he tried to 
think of other things. He thought of the Big Leagues, to him they were the Gran Ligas, 
and he knew that the Yankees of New York were playing the Tigres of Detroit. 

This is the second day now that I do not know the result of the juegos, he thought. 
But I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all 
things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel. What is a bone spur? 
He asked himself. Un espuela de hueso. We do not have them. Can it be as painful as 
the spur of a fighting cock in one's heel? I do not think I could endure that or the loss 
of the eye and of both eyes and continue to fight as the fighting cocks do. Man is not 
much beside the great birds and beasts. Still I would rather be that beast down there in 
the darkness of the sea.(juegos: sports; games)(bone spur: a spurlike outgrowth from a tissue, especially 
from a bone. The operation in 1947 for removal of the spur in Dimaggio ’s heel did not remove the danger of 
irritation and pain.) 

(Notice the old man’s attitude towards the birds and beasts, and the foreshadowing.) 

"Unless sharks come,” he said aloud. "If sharks come, God pity him and me. " 

Do you believe the great DiMaggio would stay with a fish as long as I will stay 
with this one? He thought. I am sure he would and more since he is young and strong. 
Also his father was a fisherman. 

But would the bone spur hurt him too much? 

"I do not know,” he said aloud. "I never had a bone spur. " 

As the sun set he remembered, to give himself more confidence, the time in the 
tavern at Casablanca when he had played the hand game with the great negro from 
Cienfuegos who was the strongest man on the docks. They had gone one day and one 
night with their elbows on a chalk line on the table and their forearms straight up and 
their hands gripped tight. Each one was trying to force the other's hand down onto the 
table. There was much betting and people went in and out of the room under the 
kerosene lights and he had looked at the arm and hand of the negro and at the negro's 
face. They changed the referees every four hours after the first eight so that the 
referees could sleep. Blood came out from under the fingernails of both his and the 


negro's hands and they looked each other in the eye and at their hands and forearms 
and the bettors went in and out of the room and sat on high chairs against the wall and 
watched. The walls were painted bright blue and were of wood and the lamps threw 
their shadows against them. The negro's shadow was huge and it moved on the wall as 
the breeze moved the lamps. (Casablanca: a seaport in northwest Africa---another hint of the old man ’s 
bravels.)(Cienfuegos: a city in Cuba.) 

The odds would change back and forth all night and they fed the negro rum 
and lighted cigarettes for him. Then the Negro, after the rum, would try for a 
tremendous effort and once he had the old man, who was not an old man then but 
was Santiago El Campeon, nearly three inches off balance. But the old man had 
raised his hand up to dead even again. He was sure then that he had the negro, who 
was a fine man and a great athlete, beaten. And at daylight when the bettors were 
asking that it be called a draw and the referee was shaking his head, he had 
unleashed his effort and forced the hand of the negro down and down until it 
rested on the wood. The match had started on a Sunday morning and ended on a 
Monday morning. Many of the bettors had asked for a draw because they had to 
go to work on the docks loading sacks of sugar or at the Havana Coal Company. 
Otherwise everyone would have wanted it to go to a finish. But he had finished it 
anyway and before anyone had to go to work. 

For a long time after that everyone had called him The Champion and there 
had been a return match in the spring. But not much money was bet and he had 
won it quite easily since he had broken the confidence of the negro from 
Cienfuegos in the first match. After that he had a few matches and then no more. 
He decided that he could beat anyone if he wanted to badly enough and he decided 
that it was bad for his right hand for fishing. He had tried a few practice matches 
with his left hand. But his left hand had always been a traitor and would not do 
what he called on it to do and he did not trust it. 

The sun will bake it out well now, he thought. It should not cramp on me 
again unless it gets too cold in the night. I wonder what this night will bring. 

An airplane passed overhead on its course to Miami and he watched its 
shadow scaring up the schools of flying fish. 

"With so much flying fish there should be dolphin, "he said, and leaned back 
on the line to see if it was possible to gain any on his fish. But he could not and it 
stayed at the hardness and waterdrop shivering that preceded breaking. The boat 
moved ahead slowly and he watched the airplane until he could no longer see it. 

It must be very strange in an airplane, he thought. I wonder what the sea looks 
like from that height? They should be able to see the fish well if they do not fly too 
high. I would like to fly very slowly at two hundred fathoms high and see the fish 
from above. In the turtle boats I was in the cross-trees of the mast-head and even at 
that height I saw much. The dolphin look greener from there and you can see their 
stripes and their purple spots and you can see all of the school as they swim. Why is it 
that all the fast-moving fish of the dark current have purple backs and usually purple 
stripes or spots? The dolphin looks green of course because he is really golden. But 
when he comes to feed, truly hungry, purple stripes show on his sides as on a marlin. 


Can it be anger, or the greater speed he makes that brings them out? 

Just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that 
heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with 
something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it 
first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and 
flapping wildly in the air. It jumped again and again in the acrobatics of its fear and he 
worked his way back to the stern and crouching and holding the big line with his right 
hand and arm, he pulled the dolphin in with his left hand, stepping on the gained line 
each time with his bare left foot. When the fish was at the stern, plunging and cutting 
from side to side in desperation, the old man leaned over the stern and lifted the 
burnished gold fish with its purple spots over the stern. Its jaws were working 
convulsively in quick bites against the hook and it pounded the bottom of the skiff 
with its long flat body, its tail and its head until he clubbed it across the shining 
golden head until it shivered and was still. 

The old man unhooked the fish, rebaited the line with another sardine and tossed 
it over. Then he worked his way slowly back to the bow. He washed his left hand and 
wiped it on his trousers. Then he shifted the heavy line from his right hand to his left 
and washed his right hand in the sea while he watched the sun go into the ocean and 
the slant of the big cord. 

"He hasn't changed at all, "he said. But watching the movement of the water 
against his hand he noticed that it was perceptibly slower. 

"I'll lash the two oars together across the stern and that will slow him in the 
night, 
” 
he said. "He's good for the night and so am I. " 

It would be better to gut the dolphin a little later to save the blood in the meat, he 
thought. I can do that a little later and lash the oars to make a drag at the same time. I 
had better keep the fish quiet now and not disturb him too much at sunset. The setting 
of the sun is a difficult time for all fish. He let his hand dry in the air then grasped the 
line with it and eased himself as much as he could and allowed himself to be pulled 
forward against the wood so that the boat took the strain as much, or more, than he 
did. 

I'm learning how to do it, he thought. This part of it anyway. Then too, remember 
he hasn't eaten since he took the bait and he is huge and needs much food. I have 
eaten the whole bonito. Tomorrow I will eat the dolphin. He called it dorado. Perhaps 
I should eat some of it when I clean it. It will be harder to eat than the bonito. But, 
then, nothing is easy. 

"How do you feel, fish?” he asked aloud. "I feel good and my left hand is better 
and I have food for a night and a day. Pull the boat, fish. " 

He did not truly feel good because the pain from the cord across his back had 
almost passed pain and gone into a dullness that he mistrusted. But I have had worse 
things than that, he thought. My hand is only cut a little and the cramp is gone from 
the other. My legs are all right. Also now I have gained on him in the question of 
sustenance. 

It was dark now as it becomes dark quickly after the sun sets in September. He 
lay against the worn wood of the bow and rested all that he could. The first stars were 


out. He did not know the name of Rigel but he saw it and knew soon they would all be 
out and he would have all his distant friends.(Rigel: a star in the constellation Orion.) 

"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. " 

Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs 
away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born 
lucky, he thought.(The moon runs away: This idea lies behind the myths of many nations. The old man is the 
hunter or fisherman of any land, interpreting the mysteries of nature.) 

Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination 
to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. How many people will he feed, he 
thought. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course not. There is no one worthy of 
eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity. 

I do not understand these things, he thought. But it is good that we do not have to 
try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our 
true brothers. 

Now, he thought, I must think about the drag. It has its perils and its merits. I may 
lose so much line that I will lose him, if he makes his effort and the drag made by the 
oars is in place and the boat loses al her lightness. Her lightness prolongs both our 
suffering but it is my safety since he has great speed that he has never yet employed. 
No matter what passes must gut the dolphin so he does not spoil and eat some of him 
to be strong. 

Now I will rest an hour more and feel that he is solid and steady before I move 
back to the stern to do the work and make the decision. In the meantime can see how 
he acts and if he shows any changes. The oars are a good trick; but it has reached the 
time to play for safety. He is much fish still and I saw that the hook was in the corner 
of his mouth and he has kept his mouth tight shut. The punishment of the hook is 
nothing. The punishment of hunger, and that he is against something that he does not 
comprehend, is everything. Rest now, old man, and let him work until your next duty 
comes. 

He rested for what he believed to be two hours. The moon did not rise now until 
late and he had no way of judging the time. Nor was he really resting except 
comparatively. He was still bearing the pull of the fish across his shoulders but he 
placed his left hand on the gunwale of the bow and confided more and more of the 
resistance to the fish to the skiff itself. 

How simple it would be if I could make the line fast, he thought. But with one 
small lurch he could break it. I must cushion the pull of the line with my body and at 
all times be ready to give line with both hands. 

"But you have not slept yet, old man," he said aloud. "It is half a day and a night 
and now another day and you have not slept. You must devise a way so that you sleep 
a little if he is quiet and steady. If you do not sleep you might become unclear in the 
head. "(sleep: Notice the repetition of the word sleep. Gertrude Stein and Hemingway discussed the importance 
of repletion in creating effects.) 

I'm clear enough in the head, he thought. Too clear. I am as clear as the stars that 
are my brothers. Still I must sleep. They sleep and the moon and the sun sleep and 


even the ocean sleeps sometimes on certain days when there is no current and a flat 
calm. 

But remember to sleep, he thought. Make yourself do it and devise some simple 
and sure way about the lines. Now go back and prepare the dolphin. It is too 
dangerous to rig the oars as a drag if you must sleep. 

I could go without sleeping, he told himself. But it would be too dangerous. 

He started to work his way back to the stern on his hands and knees, being careful 
not to jerk against the fish. He may be half asleep himself, he thought. But I do not 
want him to rest. He must pull until he dies. 

Back in the stern he turned so that his left hand held the strain of the line 
across his shoulders and drew his knife from its sheath with his right hand. The 
stars were bright now and he saw the dolphin clearly and he pushed the blade of 
his knife into his head and drew him out from under the stern. He put one of his 
feet on the fish and slit him quickly from the vent up to the tip of his lower jaw. 
Then he put his knife down and gutted him with his right hand, scooping him 
clean and pulling the gills clear. He felt the maw heavy and slippery in his hands 
and he slit it open. There were two flying fish inside. They were fresh and hard 
and he laid them side by side and dropped the guts and the gills over the stern. 
They sank leaving a trail of phosphorescence in the water. The dolphin was cold 
and a leprous gray-white now in the starlight and the old man skinned one side of 
him while he held his right foot on the fish's head. Then he turned him over and 
skinned the other side and cut each side off from the head down to the tail.(cold and a 
leprous gray-white: Hemingway’s careful observation of the appearance and manner of death is reflected here, as 
in his other books.) 

He slid the carcass overboard and looked to see if there was any swirl in the 
water. But there was only the light of its slow descent. He turned then and placed 
the two flying fish inside the two fillets of fish and putting his knife back in its 
sheath, he worked his way slowly back to the bow. His back was bent with the 
weight of the line across it and he carried the fish in his right hand. 

Back in the bow he laid the two fillets of fish out on the wood with the flying 
fish beside them. After that he settled the line across his shoulders in a new place 
and held it again with his left hand resting on the gunwale. Then he leaned over 
the side and washed the flying fish in the water, noting the speed of the water 
against his hand. His hand was phosphorescent from skinning the fish and he 
watched the flow of the water against it. The flow was less strong and as he 
rubbed the sides of his hand against the planking of the skiff, particles of 
phosphorus floated off and drifted slowly astern. 

"He is tiring or he is resting," the old man said. "Now let me get through the 
eating of this dolphin and get some rest and a little sleep. " 

Under the stars and with the night colder all the time he ate half of one of the 
dolphin fillets and one of the flying fish, gutted and with its head cut off. 

" What an excellent fish dolphin is to eat cooked," he said. "And what a 
miserable fish raw. I will never go in a boat again without salt or limes. " 

If I had brains I would have splashed water on the bow all day and drying, it 


would have made salt, he thought. But then I did not hook the dolphin until almost 
sunset. Still it was a lack of preparation. But I have chewed it all well and I am not 
nauseated. 

The sky was clouding over to the east and one after another the stars he knew 
were gone. It looked now as though he were moving into a great canyon of clouds and 
the wind had dropped. 

"There will be bad weather in three or four days," he said. "But not tonight and 
not tomorrow. Rig now to get some sleep, old man, while the fish is calm and steady. 
" 

He held the line tight in his right hand and then pushed his thigh against his right 
hand as he leaned all his weight against the wood of the bow. Then he passed the line 
a little lower on his shoulders and braced his left hand on it. 

My right hand can hold it as long as it is braced, he thought. If it relaxes in sleep 
my left hand will wake me as the line goes out. It is hard on the right hand. But he is 
used to punishment. Even if I sleep twenty minutes or a half an hour it is good. He lay 
forward cramping himself against the line with all of his body, putting all his weight 
onto his right hand, and he was asleep. 

He did not dream of the lions but instead of a vast school of porpoises that 
stretched for eight or ten miles and it was in the time of their mating and they would 
leap high into the air and return into the same hole they had made in the water when 
they leaped. 

Then he dreamed that he was in the village on his bed and there was a norther and 
he was very cold and his right arm was asleep because his head had rested on it 
instead of a pillow. 

After that he began to dream of the long yellow beach and he saw the first of the 
lions come down onto it in the early dark and then the other lions came and he rested 
his chin on the wood of the bows where the ship lay anchored with the evening 
off-shore breeze and he waited to see if there would be more lions and he was happy. 

The moon had been up for a long time but he slept on and the fish pulled on 
steadily and the boat moved into the tunnel of clouds. 

He woke with the jerk of his right fist coming up against his face and the line 
burning out through his right hand. He had no feeling of his left hand but he braked all 
he could with his right and the line rushed out. Finally his left hand found the line and 
he leaned back against the line and now it burned his back and his left hand, and his 
left hand was taking all the strain and cutting badly. He looked back at the coils of 
line and they were feeding smoothly. Just then the fish jumped making a great 
bursting of the ocean and then a heavy fall. Then he jumped again and again and the 
boat was going fast although line was still racing out and the old man was raising the 
strain to breaking point and raising it to breaking point again and again. He had been 
pulled down tight onto the bow and his face was in the cut slice of dolphin and he 
could not move. 

This is what we waited for, he thought. So now let us take it. 

Make him pay for the line, he thought. Make him pay for it. 
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He could not see the fish's jumps but only heard the breaking of the ocean and the 


heavy splash as he fell. The speed of the line was cutting his hands badly but he had 
always known this would happen and he tried to keep the cutting across the calloused 
parts and not let the line slip into the palm nor cut the fingers. 

If the boy was here he would wet the coils of line, he thought. Yes. If the boy 
were here. If the boy were here. 

The line went out and out and out but it was slowing now and he was making the 
fish earn each inch of it. Now he got his head up from the wood and out of the slice of 
fish that his cheek had crushed. Then he was on his knees and then he rose slowly to 
his feet. He was ceding line but more slowly all the time. He worked back to where he 
could feel with his foot the coils of line that he could not see. There was plenty of line 
still and now the fish had to pull the friction of all that new line through the water. 

Yes, he thought. And now he has jumped more than a dozen times and filled the 
sacks along his back with air and he cannot go down deep to die where I cannot bring 
him up. He will start circling soon and then I must work on him. I wonder what 
started him so suddenly? Could it have been hunger that made him desperate, or was 
he frightened by something in the night? Maybe he suddenly felt fear. But he was 
such a calm, strong fish and he seemed so fearless and so confident. It is strange. 

"You better be fearless and confident yourself, old man," he said. "You're holding 
him again but you cannot get line. But soon he has to circle. " 

The old man held him with his left hand and his shoulders now and stooped 
down and scooped up water in his right hand to get the crushed dolphin flesh off 
his face. He was afraid that it might nauseate him and he would vomit and lose his 
strength. When his face was cleaned he washed his right hand in the water over the 
side and then let it stay in the salt water while he watched the first light come 
before the sunrise. He's headed almost east, he thought. That means he is tired and 
going with the current. Soon he will have to circle. Then our true work begins. 

After he judged that his right hand had been in the water long enough he took 
it out and looked at it. 

"It is not bad. " he said. "And pain does not matter to a man. ' 

He took hold of the line carefully so that it did not fit into any of the fresh line 
cuts and shifted his weight so that he could put his left hand into the sea on the 
other side of the skiff. 

"You did not do so badly for something worthless," he said to his left hand. 
"But there was a moment when I could not find you. " 

Why was I not born with two good hands? He thought. Perhaps it was my 
fault in not training that one properly. But God knows he has had enough chances 
to learn. He did not do so badly in the night, though, and he has only cramped 
once. If he cramps again let the line cut him off.(The treachery of the old man’s hand can be 
compared with the treachery of body or spirit in the books about bullfighting.) 

When he thought that he knew that he was not being clear-headed and he 
thought he should chew some more of the dolphin. But I can't, he told himself. It is 
better to be light-headed than to lose your strength from nausea. And I know I 
cannot keep it if I eat it since my face was in it. I will keep it for an emergency 
until it goes bad. But it is too late to try for strength now through nourishment. 


You're stupid, he told himself. Eat the other flying fish. 

It was there, cleaned and ready, and he picked it up with his left hand and ate 
it chewing the bones carefully and eating all of it down to the tail. 

It has more nourishment than almost any fish, he thought. At least the kind of 
strength that I need. Now I have done what I can, he thought. Let him begin to 
circle and let the fight come. 

The sun was rising for the third time since he had put to sea when the fish 
started to circle. 

He could not see by the slant of the line that the fish was circling. It was too 
early for that. He just felt a faint slackening of the pressure of the line and he 
commenced to pull on it gently with his right hand. It tightened, as always, but just 
when he reached the point where it would break, line began to come in. He slipped 
his shoulders and head from under the line and began to pull in line steadily and 
gently. He used both of his hands in a swinging motion and tried to do the pulling 
as much as he could with his body and his legs. His old legs and shoulders pivoted 
with the swinging of the pulling. 

"It is a very big circle," he said. "But he is circling. " 

Then the line would not come in any more and he held it until he saw the 
drops jumping from it in the sun. Then it started out and the old man knelt down 
and let it go grudgingly back into the dark water. 

"He is making the far part of his circle now," he said. I must hold all I can, he 
thought. The strain will shorten his circle each time. Perhaps in an hour I will see 
him. Now I must convince him and then I must kill him. 

But the fish kept on circling slowly and the old man was wet with sweat and 
tired deep into his bones two hours later. But the circles were much shorter now 
and from the way the line slanted he could tell the fish had risen steadily while he 
swam. 

For an hour the old man had been seeing black spots before his eyes and the 
sweat salted his eyes and salted the cut over his eye and on his forehead. He was 
not afraid of the black spots. They were normal at the tension that he was pulling 
on the line. Twice, though, he had felt faint and dizzy and that had worried him. 

"I could not fail myself and die on a fish like this. " he said. "Now that I have 
him coming so beautifully, God help me endure. I'll say a hundred Our Fathers 
and a hundred Hail Marys. But I cannot say them now. " 

Consider them said, he thought. I'll say them later. 

Just then he felt a sudden banging and jerking on the line he held with his two 
hands. It was sharp and hard-feeling and heavy. 

He is hitting the wire leader with his spear, he thought. That was bound to 
come. He had to do that. It may make him jump though and I would rather he 
stayed circling now. The jumps were necessary for him to take air. But after that 
each one can widen the opening of the hook wound and he can throw the hook. 

"Don't jump, fish," he said. "Don't jump. " 

The fish hit the wire several times more and each time he shook his head the 
old man gave up a little line. 


I must hold his pain where it is, he thought. Mine does not matter. I can control 
mine. But his pain could drive him mad. 

'After a while the fish stopped beating at the wire and started circling slowly 
again. The old man was gaining line steadily now. But he felt faint again. He lifted 
some sea water with his left hand and put it on his head. Then he put more on and 
rubbed the back of his neck. 

"I have no cramps. " he said. "He'll be up soon and I can last. You have to last. 
Don't even speak of it. 
” 

He kneeled against the bow and, for a moment, slipped the line over his back 
again. I'll rest now while he goes out on the circle and then stand up and work on him 
when he comes in, he decided. 

It was a great temptation to rest in the bow and let the fish make one circle by 
himself without recovering any line. But when the strain showed the fish had turned 
to come toward the boat, the old man rose to his feet and started the pivoting and the 
weaving pulling that brought in all the line he gained. 

I'm tireder than I have ever been, he thought, and now the trade wind is rising. 
But that will be good to take him in with. I need that badly. 

"I'll rest on the next turn as he goes out," he said. "I feel much better. Then in two 
or three turns more I will have him. " 

His straw hat was far on the back of his head and he sank down into the bow with 
the pull of the line as he felt the fish turn. 

You work now, fish, he thought. I'll take you at the turn. 

The sea had risen considerably. But it was a fair-weather breeze and he had to 
have it to get home. 

"I'll just steer south and west,." he said. "A man is never lost at sea and it is a long 
island. " 

It was on the third turn that he saw the fish first. 

He saw him first as a dark shadow that took so long to pass under the boat that he 
could not believe its length. 

"No," he said. "He can't be that big. " 

But he was that big and at the end of this circle he came to the surface only thirty 
yards away and the man saw his tail out of water. It was higher than a big scythe 
blade and a very pale lavender above the dark blue water. It raked back and as the fish 
swam just below the surface the old man could see his huge bulk and the purple 
stripes that banded him. His dorsal fin was down and his huge pectorals were spread 
wide. 

On this circle the old man could see the fish's eye and the two gray sucking fish 
that swam around him. Sometimes they attached themselves to him. Sometimes they 
darted off. Sometimes they would swim easily in his shadow. They were each over 
three feet long and when they swam fast they lashed their whole bodies like eels. 

The old man was sweating now but from something else besides the sun. On each 
calm placid turn the fish made he was gaining line and he was sure that in two turns 
more he would have a chance to get the harpoon in. 

But I must get him close, close, close, he thought. I mustn't try for the head. I 


must get the heart. 

"Be calm and strong, old man," he said. 

On the next circle the fish's back was out but he was a little too far from the boat. 
On the next circle he was still too far away but he was higher out of water and the old 
man was sure that by gaining some more line he could have him alongside. 

He had rigged his harpoon long before and its coil of light rope was in a round 
basket and the end was made fast to the bitt in the bow. 

The fish was coming in on his circle now calm and beautiful looking and only his 
great tail moving. The old man pulled on him all that he could to bring him closer. For 
just a moment the fish turned a little on his side. Then he straightened himself and 
began another circle. 

"I moved him," the old man said. "I moved him then. " 

He felt faint again now but he held on the great fish all the strain that he could. I 
moved him, he thought. Maybe this time I can get him over. Pull, hands, he thought. 
Hold up, legs. Last for me, head. Last for me. You never went. This time I'll pull him 
over. 

But when he put all of his effort on, starting it well out before the fish came 
alongside and pulling with all his strength, the fish pulled part way over and then 
righted himself and swam away. 

"Fish," the old man said. "Fish, you are going to have to die anyway. Do you 
have to kill me too?" 

That way nothing is accomplished, he thought. His mouth was too dry to speak 
but he could not reach for the water now. I must get him alongside this time, he 
thought. I am not good for many more turns. Yes you are, he told himself. You're 
good for ever. 

On the next turn, he nearly had him. But again the fish righted himself and swam 
slowly away. 

You are killing me fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have 
I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. 
Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who. 

Now you are getting confused in the head, he thought. You must keep your head 
clear. Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man. Or a fish, he thought. 

"Clear up, head," he said in a voice he could hardly hear. "Clear up. " 

Twice more it was the same on the turns. 

I do not know, the old man thought. He had been on the point of feeling himself 
go each time. I do not know. But I will try it once more. 

He tried it once more and he felt himself going when he turned the fish. The fish 
righted himself and swam off again slowly with the great tail weaving in the air. 

I'll try it again, the old man promised, although his hands were mushy now and he 
could only see well in flashes. 

He tried it again and it was the same. So, he thought, and he felt himself going 
before he started; I will try it once again. 

He took all his pain and what was left of his strength and his long gone pride and 
he put it against the fish's agony and the fish came over onto his side and swam gently 


on his side, his bill almost touching the planking of the skiff and started to pass the 
boat, long, deep, wide, silver and barred with purple and interminable in the water. 

The old man dropped the line and put his foot on it and lifted the harpoon as high 
as he could and drove it down with all his strength, and more strength he had just 
summoned, into the fish's side just behind the great chest fin that rose high in the air 
to the altitude of the man's chest. He felt the iron go in and he leaned on it and drove it 
further and then pushed all his weight after it. 

Then the fish came alive, with his death in him, and rose high out of the water 
showing all his great length and width and all his power and his beauty. He seemed to 
hang in the air above the old man in the skiff. Then he fell into the water with a crash 
that sent spray over the old man and over all of the skiff. 

The old man felt faint and sick and he could not see well. But he cleared the 
harpoon line and let it run slowly through his raw hands and, when he could see, he 
saw the fish was on his back with his silver belly up. The shaft of the harpoon was 
projecting at an angle from the fish's shoulder and the sea was discoloring with the red 
of the blood from his heart. First it was dark as a shoal in the blue water that was more 
than a mile deep. Then it spread like a cloud. The fish was silver and still and floated 
with the waves. 

The old man looked carefully in the glimpse of vision that he had. Then he took 
two turns of the harpoon line around the bitt in the bow and laid his head on his 
hands. 

"Keep my head clear," he said against the wood of the bow. "I am a tired old man. 
But I have killed this fish which is my brother and now I must do the slave work. " 

Now I must prepare the nooses and the rope to lash him alongside, he thought. 
Even if we were two and swamped her to load him and bailed her out, this skiff would 
never hold him. I must prepare everything, then bring him in and lash him well and 
step the mast and set sail for home. 

He started to pull the fish in to have him alongside so that he could pass a line 
through his gills and out his mouth and make his head fast alongside the bow. I want 
to see him, he thought, and to touch and to feel him. He is my fortune, he thought. But 
that is not why I wish to feel him. I think I felt his heart, he thought. When I pushed 
on the harpoon shaft the second time. Bring him in now and make him fast and get the 
noose around his tail and another around his middle to bind him to the skiff. 

"Get to work, old man," he said. He took a very small drink of the water. "There 
is very much slave work to be done now that the fight is over. " 

He looked up at the sky and then out to his fish. He looked at the sun carefully. 
It is not much more than noon, he thought. And the trade wind is rising. The lines all 
mean nothing now. The boy and I will splice them when we are home. 

"Come on, fish," he said. But the fish did not come. Instead he lay there 
wallowing now in the seas and the old man pulled the skiff up onto him. 

When he was even with him and had the fish's head against the bow he could not 
believe his size. But he untied the harpoon rope from the bitt, passed it through the 
fish's gills and out his jaws, made a turn around his sword then passed the rope 
through the other gill, made another turn around the bill and knotted the double 


rope and made it fast to the bitt in the bow. He cut the rope then and went astern to 
noose the tail. The fish had turned silver from his original purple and silver, and 
the stripes showed the same pale violet color as his tail. They were wider than a 
man's hand with his fingers spread and the fish's eye looked as detached as the 
mirrors in a periscope or as a saint in a procession. 

"It was the only way to kill him," the old man said. He was feeling better since 
the water and he knew he would not go away and his head was clear. He's over 
fifteen hundred pounds the way he is, he thought. Maybe much more. If he dresses 
out two-thirds of that at thirty cents a pound? 

"I need a pencil for that," he said. "My head is not that clear. But I think the 
great DiMaggio would be proud of me today. I had no bone spurs. But the hands 
and the back hurt truly. " I wonder what a bone spur is, he thought. Maybe we 
have them without knowing of it. 

He made the fish fast to bow and stern and to the middle thwart. He was so 
big it was like lashing a much bigger skiff alongside. He cut a piece of line and 
tied the fish's lower jaw against his bill so his mouth would not open and they 
would sail as cleanly as possible. Then he stepped the mast and, with the stick that 
was his gaff and with his boom rigged, the patched sail drew, the boat began to 
move, and half lying in the stern he sailed southwest.(boom: a long spar run out to extend the 
foot of a sail.) 

He did not need a compass to tell him where southwest was. He only needed 
the feel of the trade wind and the drawing of the sail. I better put a small line out 
with a spoon on it and try and get something to eat and drink for the moisture. But 
he could not find a spoon and his sardines were rotten. So he hooked a patch of 
yellow gulf weed with the gaff as they passed and shook it so that the small 
shrimps that were in it fell onto the planking of the skiff. There were more than a 
dozen of them and they jumped and kicked like sand fleas. The old man pinched 
their heads off with his thumb and forefinger and ate them chewing up the shells 
and the tails. They were very tiny but he knew they were nourishing and they 
tasted good. 

The old man still had two drinks of water in the bottle and he used half of one 
after he had eaten the shrimps. The skiff was sailing well considering the 
handicaps and he steered with the tiller under his arm. He could see the fish and he 
had only to look at his hands and feel his back against the stern to know that this had 
truly happened and was not a dream. At one time when he was feeling so badly 
toward the end, he had thought perhaps it was a dream. Then when he had seen the 
fish come out of the water and hang motionless in the sky before he fell, he was sure 
there was some great strangeness and he could not believe it. Then he could not see 
well, although now he saw as well as ever.(tiller: a bar or lever attached to the head of the rudder, to 
turn the rudder in steering.) 

Now he knew there was the fish and his hands and back were no dream. The 
hands cure quickly, he thought. I bled them clean and the salt water will heal them. 
The dark water of the true gulf is the greatest healer that there is. All I must do is keep 
the head clear. The hands have done their work and we sail well. With his mouth shut 


and his tail straight up and down we sail like brothers. Then his head started to 
become a little unclear and he thought, is he bringing me in or am I bringing him in? 
If I were towing him behind there would be no question. Nor if the fish were in the 
skiff, with all dignity gone, there would be no question either. But they were sailing 
together lashed side by side and the old man thought, let him bring me in if it pleases 
him. I am only better than him through trickery and he meant me no harm.(The old man’s 
questioning of himself occurs in the paragraph beginning “Now he knew…”) 
They sailed well and the old man soaked his hands in the salt water and tried to 
keep his head clear. There were high cumulus clouds and enough cirrus above them 
so that the old man knew the breeze would last all night. The old man looked at the 
fish constantly to make sure it was true. It was an hour before the first shark hit him. 

The shark was not an accident. He had come up from deep down in the water as 
the dark cloud of blood had settled and dispersed in the mile deep sea. He had come 
up so fast and absolutely without caution that he broke the surface of the blue water 
and was in the sun. Then he fell back into the sea and picked up the scent and started 
swimming on the course the skiff and the fish had taken. 

Sometimes he lost the scent. But he would pick it up again, or have just a trace of 
it and he swam fast and hard on the course. He was a very big Mako shark built to 
swim as fast as the fastest fish in the sea and everything about him was beautiful 
except his jaws. His back was as blue as a sword fish's and his belly was silver and his 
hide was smooth and handsome. He was built as a sword fish except for his huge jaws 
which were tight shut now as he swam fast, just under the surface with his high dorsal 
fin knifing through the water without wavering. Inside the closed double lip of his 
jaws all of his eight rows of teeth were slanted inwards. They were not the ordinary 
pyramid-shaped teeth of most sharks. They were shaped like a man's fingers when 
they are crisped like claws. They were nearly as long as the fingers of the old man and 
they had razor-sharp cutting edges on both sides. This was a fish built to feed on all 
the fishes in the sea, that were so fast and strong and well armed that they had no 
other enemy. Now he speeded up as he smelled the fresher scent and his blue dorsal 
fin cut the water. 

When the old man saw him coming he knew that this was a shark that had no fear 
at all and would do exactly what he wished. He prepared the harpoon and made the 
rope fast while he watched the shark come on. The rope was short as it lacked what he 
had cut away to lash the fish. 

The old man's head was clear and good now and he was full of resolution but he 
had little hope. It was too good to last, he thought. He took one look at the great fish 
as he watched the shark close in. It might as well have been a dream, he thought. I 
cannot keep him from hitting me but maybe I can get him. Dentuso, he thought. Bad 
luck to your mother.(Dentuso: a term that the old man applies to the Mako shark, referring perhaps to she 
sharp teeth.) 

The shark closed fast astern and when he hit the fish the old man saw his mouth 
open and his strange eyes and the clicking chop of the teeth as he drove forward in the 
meat just above the tail. The shark's head was out of water and his back was coming 
out and the old man could hear the noise of skin and flesh ripping on the big fish 


when he rammed the harpoon down onto the shark's head at a spot where the line 
between his eyes intersected with the line that ran straight back from his nose. There 
were no such lines. There was only the heavy sharp blue head and the big eyes and the 
clicking, thrusting all-swallowing jaws. But that was the location of the brain and the 
old man hit it. He hit it with his blood mushed hands driving a good harpoon with all 
his strength. He hit it without hope but with resolution and complete malignancy.(The 
description of the shark should be compared with that of the marlin.) 

The shark swung over and the old man saw his eye was not alive and then he 
swung over once again, wrapping himself in two loops of the rope. The old man knew 
that he was dead but the shark would not accept it. Then, on his back, with his tail 
lashing and his jaws clicking, the shark plowed over the water as a speed-boat does. 
The water was white where his tail beat it and three-quarters of his body was clear 
above the water when the rope came taut, shivered, and then snapped. The shark lay 
quietly for a little while on the surface and the old man watched him. Then he 
went down very slowly. 

"He took about forty pounds," the old man said aloud. He took my harpoon 
too and all the rope, he thought, and now my fish bleeds again and there will be 
others. 

He did not like to look at the fish anymore since he had been mutilated. When 
the fish had been hit it was as though he himself were hit. 

But I killed the shark that hit my fish, he thought. And he was the biggest 
dentuso that I have ever seen. And God knows that I have seen big ones. 

It was too good to last, he thought. I wish it had been a dream now and that I 
had never hooked the fish and was alone in bed on the newspapers. 

"But man is not made for defeat," he said. "A man can be destroyed but not 
defeated. "I am sorry that I killed the fish though, he thought. Now the bad time is 
coming and I do not even have the harpoon. The dentuso is cruel and able and 
strong and intelligent. But I was more intelligent than he was. Perhaps not, he 
thought. Perhaps I was only better armed. 

"Don't think, old man," he said aloud. "Sail on this course and take it when it 
comes. " 

But I must think, he thought. Because it is all I have left. That and baseball. I 
wonder how the great DiMaggio would have liked the way I hit him in the brain? 
It was no great thing, he thought. Any man could do it. But do you think my hands 
were as great a handicap as the bone spurs? I cannot know. I never had anything 
wrong with my heel except the time the sting ray stung it when I stepped on him 
when swimming and paralyzed the lower leg and made the unbearable pain. 

"Think about something cheerful, old man," he said. "Every minute now you 
are closer to home. You sail lighter for the loss of forty pounds. " 
He knew quite well the pattern of what could happen when he reached the 
inner part of the current. But there was nothing to be done now. 
"Yes there is," he said aloud. "I can lash my knife to the butt of one of the oars. 
" 
So he did that with the tiller under his arm and the sheet of the sail under his 


foot. 

"Now," he said. "I am still an old man. But I am not unarmed. " 

The breeze was fresh now and he sailed on well. He watched only the forward 
part of the fish and some of his hope returned. It is silly not to hope, he thought. 
Besides I believe it is a sin. Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough 
problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it. 

I have no understanding of it and I am not sure that I believe in it. Perhaps it was 
a sin to kill the fish. I suppose it was even though I did it to keep me alive and feed 
many people. But then everything is a sin. Do not think about sin. It is much too late 
for that and there are people who are paid to do it. Let them think about it. You were 
born to be a fisherman as the fish was born to be a fish. San Pedro was a fisherman as 
was the father of the great DiMaggio.(San Pedro: Saint Peter. It is worth noticing that the old man ’s 
name, Santiago, means Saint James.) 

But he liked to think about all things that he was involved in and since there was 
nothing to read and he did not have a radio, he thought much and he kept on thinking 
about sin. 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. 

But you enjoyed killing the dentuso, he thought. 

He lives on the live fish as you do. He is not a scavenger nor just a moving 
appetite as some sharks are. He is beautiful and noble and knows no fear of anything. 

"I killed him in self-defense," the old man said aloud. "And I killed him well. " 

Besides, he thought, everything kills everything else in some way. Fishing kills 
me exactly as it keeps me alive. The boy keeps me alive, he thought. I must not 
deceive myself too much.(The cryptic comments on killing are worth discussing.) 

He leaned over the side and pulled loose a piece of the meat of the fish where the 
shark had cut him. He chewed it and noted its quality and its good taste. It was firm 
and juicy, like meat, but it was not red. There was no springiness in it and he knew 
that it would bring the highest price in the market. But there was no way to keep its 
scent out of the water and the old man knew that a very bad time was coming. 

The breeze was steady. It had backed a little further into the northeast and he 
knew that meant that it would not fall off. The old man looked ahead of him but he 
could see no sails nor could he see the hull nor the smoke of any ship. There were 
only the flying fish that went up from his bow sailing away to either side and the 
yellow patches of gulf-weed. He could not even see a bird. He had ailed for two 
hours, resting in the stern and sometimes chewing a bit of the meat from the 
marlin, trying to rest and to be strong, when he saw the first of the two sharks. 

"Ay," he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just 
a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his 
hands and into the wood. 

" Galanos. " he said aloud. He had seen the second fin now coming up behind 
the first and had identified them as shovel-nosed sharks by the brown, triangular 


fin and the sweeping movements of the tail. They had the scent and were excited 
and in the stupidity of their great hunger they were losing and finding the scent in 
their excitement. But they were closing all the time.(Galanos: From the original meaning of 
fine, gallant, elegant, the word may be used here with the sense of parti-colored. There is a suggestion of 
deterioration, perhaps of treacherous fineness.) 

The old man made the sheet fast and jammed the tiller. Then he took up the 
oar with the knife lashed to it. He lifted it as lightly as he could because his hands 
rebelled at the pain. Then he opened and closed them on it lightly to loosen them. 
He closed them firmly so they would take the pain now and would not flinch and 
watched the sharks come. He could see their wide, flattened, shovel-pointed heads 
now and their white-tipped wide pectoral fins. They were hateful sharks, bad 
smelling, scavengers as well as killers, and when they were hungry they would 
bite at an oar or the rudder of a boat. It was these sharks that would cut the turtles' 
legs and flippers off when the turtles were asleep on the surface, and they would 
hit a man in the water, if they were hungry, even if the man had no smell of fish 
blood nor of fish slime on him. 

"Ay," the old man said. "Galanos. Come on Galanos. " 

They came. But they did not come as the Mako had come. One turned and 
went out of sight under the skiff and the old man could feel the skiff shake as he 
jerked and pulled on the fish. The other watched the old man with his slitted 
yellow eyes and then came in fast with his half circle of jaws wide to hit the fish 
where he had already been bitten. The line showed clearly on the top of his brown 
head and back where the brain joined the spinal cord and the old man drove the 
knife on the oar into the juncture, withdrew it, and drove it in again into the shark's 
yellow cat-like eyes. The shark let go of the fish and slid down, swallowing what 
he had taken as he died. 

The skiff was still shaking with the destruction the other shark was doing to 
the fish and the old man let go the sheet so that the skiff would swing broadside 
and bring the shark out from under. When he saw the shark he leaned over the side 
and punched at him. He hit only meat and the hide was set hard and he barely got 
the knife in. The blow hurt not only his hands but his shoulder too. But the shark 
came up fast and his head out and the old man hit him squarely in the center of his 
flat-topped head as his nose came out of water and lay against the fish. The old 
man withdrew the blade and punched the shark exactly in the same spot again. He 
still hung to the fish with his jaws hooked and the old man stabbed him in his left 
eye. The shark still hung there. 

"No?" the old man said and he drove the blade between the vertebrae and the 
brain. It was an easy shot now and he felt the cartilage sever. The old man 
reversed the oar and put the blade between the shark's jaws to open them. He 
twisted the blade and as the shark slid loose he said, "Go on, galano. Slide down a 
mile deep. Go see your friend, or maybe it's your mother. " 

(Notice the old man’s state of mind.) 

The old man wiped the blade of his knife and laid down the oar. Then he 
found the sheet and the sail filled and he brought the skiff onto her course. 


"They must have taken a quarter of him and of the best meat," he said aloud. 
"I wish it were a dream and that I had never hooked him. I'm sorry about it, fish. It 
makes everything wrong. " He stopped and he did not want to look at the fish now. 
Drained of blood and awash he looked the color of the silver backing of a mirror 
and his stripes still showed. 

"I shouldn't have gone out so far, fish," he said. "Neither for you nor for me. 
I'm sorry, fish. "(“I shouldn’t have gone out so far, fish”: This idea is repeated during the rest of the story.) 

Now, he said to himself. Look to the lashing on the knife and see if it has been 
cut. Then get your hand in order because there still is more to come. 

"I wish I had a stone for the knife," the old man said after he had checked the 
lashing on the oar butt. "I should have brought a stone. " You should have brought 
many things, he thought. But you did not bring them, old man. Now is no time to 
think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is. 

" You give me much good counsel," he said aloud. "I'm tired of it. "(“You give me 
much good counsel”: To whom is this remark addressed?) 

He held the tiller under his arm and soaked both his hands in the water as the 
skiff drove forward. 

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"God knows how much that last one took," he said. "But she's much lighter 
now. " He did not want to think of the mutilated under-side of the fish. He knew 
that each of the jerking bumps of the shark had been meat torn away and that the fish 
now made a trail for all sharks as wide as a highway through the sea. 

He was a fish to keep a man all winter, he thought. Don't think of that. Just rest 
and try to get your hands in shape to defend what is left of him. The blood smell from 
my hands means nothing now with all that scent in the water. Besides they do not 
bleed much. There is nothing cut that means anything. The bleeding may keep the left 
from cramping. 

What can I think of now? He thought. Nothing. I must think of nothing and wait 
for the next ones. I wish it had really been a dream, he thought. But who knows? It 
might have turned out well. 

The next shark that came was a single shovel-nose. He came like a pig to the 
trough if a pig had a mouth so wide that you could put your head in it. The old man let 
him hit the fish and then drove the knife on the oar down into his brain. But the shark 
jerked backwards as he rolled and the knife blade snapped. 

The old man settled himself to steer. He did not even watch the big shark sinking 
slowly in the water, showing first life-size, then small, then tiny. That always 
fascinated the old man. But he did not even watch it now. 

"I have the gaff now," he said. "But it will do no good. I have the two oars and 
the tiller and the short club. " 

Now they have beaten me, he thought. I am too old to club sharks to death. But I 
will try it as long as I have the oars and the short club and the tiller. 

He put his hands in the water again to soak them. It was getting late in the 
afternoon and he saw nothing but the sea and the sky. There was more wind in the sky 
than there had been, and soon he hoped that he would see land. 

"You're tired, old man," he said. "You're tired inside. " 


The sharks did not hit him again until just before sunset. 

The old man saw the brown fins coming along the wide trail the fish must make 
in the water. They were not even quartering on the scent. They were headed straight 
for the skiff swimming side by side. 

He jammed the tiller, made the sheet fast and reached under the stern for the club. 
It was an oar handle from a broken oar sawed off to about two and a half feet in 
length. He could only use it effectively with one hand because of the grip of the 
handle and he took good hold of it with his right hand, flexing his hand on it, as he 
watched the sharks come. They were both galanos. 

I must let the first one get a good hold and hit him on the point of the nose or 
straight across the top of the head, he thought. 

The two sharks closed together and as he saw the one nearest him open his 
jaws and sink them into the silver side of the fish, he raised the club high and 
brought it down heavy and slamming onto the top of the shark's broad head. He 
felt the rubbery solidity as the club came down. But he felt the rigidity of bone too 
and he struck the shark once more hard across the point of the nose as he slid 
down from the fish. 

The other shark had been in and out and now came in again with his jaws 
wide. The old man could see pieces of the meat of the fish spilling white from the 
corner of his jaws as he bumped the fish and closed his jaws. He swung at him and 
hit only the head and the shark looked at him and wrenched the meat loose. The 
old man swung the club down on him again as he slipped away to swallow and hit 
only the heavy solid rubberiness. 

"Come on, galano. " the old man said. "Come in again. " 

The shark came in a rush and the old man hit him as he shut his jaws. He hit 
him solidly and from as high up as he could raise the club. This time he felt the 
bone at the base of the brain and he hit him again in the same place while the shark 
tore the meat loose sluggishly and slid down from the fish. 

The old man watched for him to come again but neither shark showed. Then 
he saw one on the surface swimming in circles. He did not see the fin of the other. 

I could not expect to kill them, he thought. I could have in my time. But I have 
hurt them both badly and neither one can feel very good. If I could have used a bat 
with two hands I could have killed the first one surely. Even now, he thought. 

He did not want to look at the fish. He knew that half of him had been 
destroyed. The sun had gone down while he had been in the fight with the shark. 

"It will be dark soon," he said. "Then I should see the glow of Havana. If I am 
too far to the eastward I will see the lights of one of the new beaches. " 

I cannot be too far out now, he thought. I hope no one has been too worried. 
There is only the boy to worry, of course. But I am sure he would have confidence. 
Many of the older fishermen will worry. Many others too, he thought. I live in a good 
town. 

He could not talk to the fish anymore because the fish had been ruined too badly. 
Then something came into his head. 

"Half fish," he said. "Fish that you were. I am sorry that I went too far out. I 


ruined us both. But we have killed many sharks, you and I, and ruined many others. 
How many did you ever kill, old fish? You do not have that spear on your head for 
nothing. " 

He liked to think of the fish and what he could do to a shark if he were swimming 
free. I should have chopped the bill off to fight them with, he thought. But there was 
no hatchet and then there was no knife. 

But if I had, and could have lashed it to an oar butt, what a weapon. Then we 
might have fought them together. What will you do now if they come in the night? 
What can you do? 

"Fight them," he said. "I'll fight them until I die. " 

But in the dark now and no glow showing and no lights and only the wind and the 
steady pull of the sail he felt that perhaps he was already dead. He put his two hands 
together and felt the palms. They were not dead and he could bring the pain of life by 
simply opening and closing them. He leaned his back against the stern and he knew he 
was not dead. His shoulders told him.(The ceremonial posture of the old man’s hands here and 
elsewhere has been interpreted by Carlos Baker as a suggestion of crucifixion---an extremity of suffering.) 

I have all those prayers I promised if I caught the fish, he thought. But I am too 
tired to say them now. I better get the sack and put it over my shoulders. 

He lay in the stern and steered and watched for the glow to come in the sky. I 
have half of him, he thought. Maybe I'll have the luck to bring the forward half in. I 
should have some luck. No, he said. You violated your luck when you went too far 
outside. 

"Don't be silly," he said aloud. "And keep awake and steer. You may have much 
luck yet. " 

"I'd like to buy some if there's any place they sell it," he said. 

What could I buy it with? He asked himself. Could I buy it with a lost harpoon 
and a broken knife and two bad hands? 

"You might," he said. "You tried to buy it with eighty-four days at sea. They 
nearly sold it to you too.' 

I must not think nonsense, he thought. Luck is a thing that comes in many forms 
and who can recognize her? I would take some though in any form and pay what they 
asked. I wish I could see the glow from the lights, he thought. I wish too many things. 
But that is the thing I wish for now. He tried to settle more comfortably to steer and 
from his pain he knew he was not dead. 

He saw the reflected glare of the lights of the city at what must have been around 
ten o'clock at night. They were only perceptible at first as the light is in the sky before 
the moon rises. Then they were steady to see across the ocean which was rough now 
with the increasing breeze. He steered inside of the glow and he thought that now, 
soon, he must hit the edge of the stream. 

Now it is over, he thought. They will probably hit me again. But what can a man 
do against them in the dark without a weapon? 

He was stiff and sore now and his wounds and all of the strained parts of his body 
hurt with the cold of the night. I hope I do not have to fight again, he thought. I hope 
so much I do not have to fight again. 


But by midnight he fought and this time he knew the fight was useless. They 
came in a pack and he could only see the lines in the water that their fins made and 
their phosphorescence as they threw themselves on the fish. He clubbed at heads and 
heard the jaws chop and the shaking of the skiff as they took hold below. He clubbed 
desperately at what he could only feel and hear and he felt something seize the club 
and it was gone. 

He jerked the tiller free from the rudder and beat and chopped with it, holding it 
in both hands and driving it down again and again. But they were up to the bow now 
and driving in one after the other and together, tearing off the pieces of meat that 
showed glowing below the sea as they turned to come once more. 

One came, finally, against the head itself and he knew that it was over. He swung 
the tiller across the shark's head where the jaws were caught in the heaviness of the 
fish's head which would not tear. He swung it once and twice and again. He heard the 
tiller break and he lunged at the shark with the splintered butt. He felt it go in and 
knowing it was sharp he drove it in again. The shark let go and rolled away. That was 
the last shark of the pack that came. There was nothing more for them to eat. 

The old man could hardly breathe now and he felt a strange taste in his mouth. It 
was coppery and sweet and he was afraid of it for a moment. But there was not much 
of it. He spat into the ocean and said, "Eat that, Galanos. And make a dream you've 
killed a man. " 

He knew he was beaten now finally and without remedy and he went back to the 
stern and found the jagged end of the tiller would fit in the slot of the rudder well 
enough for him to steer. He settled the sack around his shoulders and put the skiff on 
her course. He sailed lightly now and he had no thoughts nor any feelings of any kind. 
He was past everything now and he sailed the skiff to make his home port as well and 
as intelligently as he could. In the night sharks hit the carcass as someone might pick 
up crumbs from the table. The old man paid no attention to them and did not pay any 
attention to anything except steering. He only noticed how lightly and how well the 
skiff sailed now there was no great weight beside her.(He knew he was beaten now: The 
denouncement indicates that this is not true, except in the limited sense of the conflict with the sharks.) 

She's good, he thought. She is sound and not harmed in any way except for the 
tiller. That is easily replaced. 

He could feel he was inside the current now and he could see the lights of the 
beach colonies along the shore. He knew where he was now and it was nothing to get 
home. 

The wind is our friend, anyway, he thought. Then he added, sometimes. And the 
great sea with our friends and our enemies. And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. 
Just bed, he thought. Bed will be a great thing. It is easy when you are beaten, he 
thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, he thought. 

"Nothing," he said aloud. "I went out too far. " 

When he sailed into the little harbor the lights of the Terrace were out and he 
knew everyone was in bed. The breeze had risen steadily and was blowing strongly 
now. It was quiet in the harbor though and he sailed up onto the little patch of shingle 
below the rocks. There was no one to help him so he pulled the boat up as far as he could. Then he stepped out and made her fast to a rock. 

He unstepped the mast and furled the sail and tied it. Then he shouldered the mast 
and started to climb. It was then he knew the depth of his tiredness. He stopped for a 
moment and looked back and saw in the reflection from the street light the great tail 
of the fish standing up well behind the skiff's stern. He saw the white naked line of his 
backbone and the dark mass of the head with the projecting bill and all the nakedness 
between. 

He started to climb again and at the top he fell and lay for some time with the 
mast across his shoulder. He tried to get up. But it was too difficult and he sat there 
with the mast on his shoulder and looked at the road. A cat passed on the far side 
going about its business and the old man watched it. Then he just watched the 
road. 

Finally he put the mast down and stood up. He picked the mast up and put it 
on his shoulder and started up the road. He had to sit down five times before he 
reached his shack. 

Inside the shack he leaned the mast against the wall. In the dark he found a 
water bottle and took a drink. Then he lay down on the bed. He pulled the blanket 
over his shoulders and then over his back and legs and he slept face down on the 
newspapers with his arms out straight and the palms of his hands up. 

He was asleep when the boy looked in the door in the morning. It was blowing 
so hard that the drifting-boats would not be going out and the boy had slept late 
and then come to the old man's shack as he had come each morning. The boy saw 
that the old man was breathing and then he saw the old man's hands and he started 
to cry. He went out very quietly to go to bring some coffee and all the way down 
the road he was crying. 

Many fishermen were around the skiff looking at what was lashed beside it 
and one was in the water, his trousers rolled up, measuring the skeleton with a 
length of line. 

The boy did not go down. He had been there before and one of the fishermen 
was looking after the skiff for him. 

"How is he?" one of the fishermen shouted. 

"Sleeping," the boy called. He did not care that they saw him crying. "Let no 
one disturb him. " 

"He was eighteen feet from nose to tail," the fisherman who was measuring 
him called. 

"I believe it," the boy said. 

He went into the Terrace and asked for a can of coffee. 

"Hot and with plenty of milk and sugar in it. " 

"Anything more?" 

"No. Afterwards I will see what he can eat. " 

"What a fish it was," the proprietor said. "There has never been such a fish. 
Those were two fine fish you took yesterday too. " 

"Damn my fish," the boy said and he started to cry again. 

"Do you want a drink of any kind?" the proprietor asked. 


" No, " the boy said. " Tell them not to bother Santiago. I'll be back. " 

"Tell him how sorry I am. " 

"Thanks," the boy said. 

The boy carried the hot can of coffee up to the old man's shack and sat by him 
until he woke. Once it looked as though he were waking. But he had gone back into 
heavy sleep and the boy had gone across the road to borrow some wood to heat the 
coffee. 

Finally the old man woke. 

"Don't sit up. " the boy said. "Drink this. " He poured some of the coffee in a 
glass. 

The old man took it and drank it. 

"They beat me, Manolin," he said. "They truly beat me. " 

"He didn't beat you. Not the fish. " 

"No. Truly. It was afterwards. " 

"Pedrico is looking after the skiff and the gear. What do you want done with the 
head?" 

"Let Pedrico chop it up to use in fish traps. " 

"And the spear?" 

"You keep it if you want it. " 

"I want it," the boy said. "Now we must make our plans about the other things. " 

"Did they search for me?" 

"Of course. With coast guard and with planes. " 

"The ocean is very big and a skiff is small and hard to see," the old man said. He 
noticed how pleasant it was to have someone to talk to instead of speaking only to 
himself and to the sea. "I missed you," he said. "What did you catch?" 

"One on the first day. One the second and two the third. " 

"Very good. " 

"Now we fish together again. " 

"No. I am not lucky. I am not lucky anymore. " 

"The hell with luck," the boy said. "I'll bring the luck with me. " 

"What will your family say?" 

"I do not care. I caught two yesterday. But we will fish together now for I still 
have much to learn. " 

"We must get a good killing lance and always have it on board. You can make the 
blade from a spring leaf from an old Ford. We can grind it in Guanabacoa. It should 
be sharp and not tempered so it will break. My knife broke. "(Guanabacoa: a city near 
Havana.) 

"I'll get another knife and have the spring ground. How many days of heavy brisa 
have we?" 

"Maybe three. Maybe more. " 

"I will have everything in order," the boy said. "You get your hands well old man. 

" 
"I know how to care for them. In the night I spat something strange and felt 
something in my chest was broken. " 


"Get that well too," the boy said. "Lie down, old man, and I will bring you 
your clean shirt. And something to eat. " 

"Bring any of the papers of the time that I was gone," the old man said. 

"You must get well fast for there is much that I can learn and you can teach 
me everything. How much did you suffer?" 

"Plenty," the old man said. 

"I'll bring the food and the papers," the boy said. "Rest well, old man. I will 
bring stuff from the drugstore for your hands. " 

"Don't forget to tell Pedrico the head is his. " 

"No. I will remember. " 

As the boy went out the door and down the worn coral rock road he was 
crying again. 

That afternoon there was a party of tourists at the Terrace and looking down in 
the water among the empty beer cans and dead barracudas a woman saw a great 
long white spine with a huge tail at the end that lifted and swung with the tide 
while the east wind blew a heavy steady sea outside the entrance to the harbor. 

"What's that?" she asked a waiter and pointed to the long backbone of the 
great fish that was now just garbage waiting to go out with the tide. 

"Tiburon," the waiter said, "Eshark. " He was meaning to explain what had 
happened. 

"I didn't know sharks had such handsome, beautifully formed tails. " 

"I didn't either," her male companion said. 

Up the road, in his shack, the old man was sleeping again. He was still 
sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man 
was dreaming about the lions. 

(Notice the placing together of the tourists 
’ 
remarks and the old man’s dreaming about the lions.) 

MARY A. CAMPBELL 

To the Student 


ERNEST HEMINGWAY 

THE biographical facts of a writer's life are significant only in their effect upon 
his art. Many of Ernest Hemingway's own experiences have provided themes, 
background material, and settings for his writing. This does not mean that he 
consistently tells his own story. The artist's skill lies in what he selects, how he adds, 
subtracts, and shapes, creating from the seed of experience something new and 
complete, with a life of its own and the ring of truth. 

Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a prosperous suburb of 


Chicago. His father, a physician, was an enthusiastic hunter and fisherman who taught 
his son to handle a rod and a gun. Hemingway's respect for these skills and his love of 
the open air run through his writing. He has tried to capture the point of view, actions, 
feelings, and speech of men who excel in the activities he admires. 

In school Hemingway was a good student, with a wide range of interests beyond 
the classroom. He was known as a boxer, a football player, a member of the 
swimming team, and manager of the track team. For three years he played in the 
school orchestra. But much of his activity was connected with words, which were 
to be his lifelong preoccupation. First as reporter, then as editor, he gained 
experience on the school paper, to which he contributed articles and stories. 

When Hemingway was graduated from high school in 1917, World War I was 
still being fought. After a few months as a reporter on the Kansas City Star, he 
sailed for Europe in May, 1918, as a volunteer ambulance driver and later 
transferred to the Italian infantry. Two weeks before his nineteenth birthday a leg 
wound brought him close to death. War and death have been recurrent themes in 
Hemingway's writing. Of war he has said, ".. 
. 
I thought about Tolstoi and about 
what a great advantage an experience of war was to a writer. It was one of the major 
subjects and certainly one of the hardest to write truly of ..." (Green Hills of Africa, 

p. 70). 
The next stage of Hemingway's life was spent in writing. After a brief 
interlude in the woods of northern Michigan, he earned his living as a reporter and 
feature writer on the Toronto Daily Star and the Star Weekly, but this was not the 
type of writing that he wanted to do. In his spare time, during holidays in France 
and Spain and during a period as foreign correspondent of the Star in Europe, he 
was teaching himself to write short stories on subjects of his own choice, evolving 
a style that he felt suited the material and writing to please himself rather than 
editors, publishers, or the public. At this time he reached a number of decisions 
about his life and work. He had a horror of sham. For this reason he was disgusted 
with many of the young men who were living Bohemian lives in Paris, posing as 
writers and artists but doing no strenuous work. Hemingway saw the genuine artist 
as a lonely figure, whose time and energy could not be dissipated in an aimless 
night life. He met and talked with a number of people who took writing seriously. 
Perhaps as a result of those discussions he decided to give up his newspaper work 
and devote himself to what he considered true writing, not merely reporting but 
creating. 

From that decision to make creative writing his major concern Hemingway 
has never retreated. He has written articles on a variety of subjects and longer 
accounts of hunting and bullfighting, but apart from some early poetry and one 
play, his creative forms have been the short story and the novel. He has continued 
to use the truth of personal experience as the starting point, selecting from it, 
combining it with other materials, transmuting it with careful craftsmanship into 
the form of art. Journeys to Spain to watch bullfighting and to report on the Civil War, 
hunting expeditions in Africa, fishing in the Caribbean, experiences on special 
missions and as war correspondent during World War II —all these are reflected in his 


books. We see World War I and its aftermath in A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also 
Rises, bullfighting in Death in the Afternoon, big-game hunting in Green Hills of Africa, 
the Spanish Civil War in For Whom the Bell Tolls, World War II in Across the River 
and into the Trees, and fishing in the Caribbean in The Old Man and the Sea. 

HEMINGWAY'S ART 

Despite his work as a journalist, Hemingway, the future Nobel prize winner, 
found it difficult to capture what he considered to be the truth of experience. Of his 
struggles he has written, "I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, 
aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to 
feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; 
what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced" 
(Death in the Afternoon, p. 2). This concentration on what is really happening has 
resulted in much writing of apparent simplicity. Yet in art, as in life, nothing is more 
deceptive than simplicity. It is impossible to understand or appreciate Hemingway's 
art without realizing this fact. His writing is the product of prolonged thought and 
painstaking work. Many of the books have taken shape slowly, with lapses of years 
between the creative idea and the final form. While writing A Farewell to Arms, 
Hemingway each morning read over from the beginning what he had written, so that 
the pattern would be fresh in his mind. In revising, he is a ruthless editor, shearing 
away everything that does not contribute directly to the effect. "Prose is architecture, 
not interior decoration..." (Death in the Afternoon,p. 191). 

All Hemingway's novels and many of the short stories are concerned with life on 
the threshold of death or disaster. His book on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, 
supplies some clues to this emphasis in his writing: "The only place where you could 
see life and death, i. e. , violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull 
ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to 
learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of 
all and the most fundamental is violent death " (p. 2 ). Hemingway's approach to the 
subject of bullfighting is much like his way of tackling the hunting of big game or of 
the great fish in The Old Man and the Sea. He is interested in the coming together of 
moments of intense life and the danger of death, with strength, skill and luck in the 
balance. The contests of hunting, war, and bullfighting produce such moments, 
with too much action to allow of an over-emotional presentation. In Hemingway's 
opinion, life is tragic, but it need not be treated in a novel with pretentious 
solemnity. 

Certain other themes or ideas recur in Hemingway's writing-----the emphasis 
on competition, the implied comparison between life and sports, and the question 
"Who really wins?" In all the major books risks are taken; life is staked on a 
hazard, with skill and luck delicately balanced; death is always imminent. In the 
face of death the question of bravery or cowardice becomes important. Interwoven 
with this are the problems of loyalty or treachery to a country, a cause, or the 
person himself. The essential loneliness of the individual and the search for 


fulfillment are revealed. The relationships between man and man, man and woman, 
man and the creatures he hunts create conflicts. In an essentially tragic struggle 
Hemingway shows his characters meeting challenges, disappointment, and 
disillusionment, some going to pieces and others accepting and coming to terms 
with their limitations and their lot. 

In handling his material, Hemingway has set for himself standards and 
restrictions. He writes only of what he knows well and what interests him, since he 
believes that only in this way can writing carry conviction. As a craftsman he 
values skill, and he makes it his business to know and explain how things are done. 
His readers learn much about methods of hunting, fishing, and bullfighting; about 
the ways of animals and fish; about the care and handling of equipment; and about 
strategy in war. All these involve action, discipline, and a strong element of ritual; 
they are activities that have engaged man's attention throughout the ages. 

The central figures of Hemingway's novels have been men of action, not given 
to discussions of politics, philosophy, or art. The lives and speech of some of his 
characters have offended readers who think that in them there is an emphasis on 
the primitive in man. It is the writer's privilege, however, to choose his subjects, 
and Hemingway's treatment of character is for him a matter of principle: 

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not 

characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there 

may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will 

remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel... People in a novel, not skillfully 

constructed characters, must be projected from the writer's assimilated 

experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there 

is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they 

will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time (Death in the 

Afternoon, p. 191). 

In his task of creating real people, Hemingway's famous dialogue is an effective 
device. It is presented in a form as close to the dramatic as possible, with a minimum 
of explanatory comment. In The Old Man and the Sea, for example, such 
interpolations as "he said" have frequently been omitted; thus the speech comes to the 
reader as if he were listening. No writer has captured the immediacy of dialogue more 
skillfully or has made economical speech imply more. Hemingway has suggested the 
limited speech of inarticulate people almost to the point of parody at times. With other 
characters he has shown how speech changes subtly, from the rough and profane to 
the tender and gracious, according to the situation. 

Though most of Hemingway's people are limited talkers, they are given to 
reflection, to memories, and to dreams. Careful reading of these passages reveals their 
inner lives. Some critics who think that Hemingway overemphasizes physical detail in 
his treatment of love, suffering, and death have accused him of making almost a cult 
of toughness. Thus, they say, only certain aspects of the person are revealed; physical 
prowess, primitive urges, and speech spattered with oaths seem to be the test of 
manliness. Actually, Hemingway's men, inarticulate in company, often reveal 
themselves to be surprisingly sensitive in their inner monologues, in recurring dreams, 


and in cherished memories. These frequently come close to poetry in their 
undercurrent of emotion and in their imaginative precision of language. Sometimes 
this inner life seems to focus on symbols-----a mountain peak, a river, or a noble 
animal. By these, a very rough or simple man will be deeply moved. Indeed, the more 
closely the reader watches, the less rough and simple the people appear. To use a 
favorite Hemingway comparison, they are like icebergs, with the weight under the 
surface. The old fisherman, Santiago, in The Old Man and the Sea lives as much in 
the world of his mind as in the life of action. His reflections and dreams are as 
necessary for the understanding of his character as are his preparations of bait, line, 
and hooks. In such passages, Hemingway the realist is balanced by Hemingway the 
poet. 

In all the stories the sense of place, as Hemingway calls it, is important. The 
feeling of the main characters for the region in which a story is set or for a place loved 
or hated is a clue to their personalities. Landscape or seascape is almost an actor, so 
much alive that it sets the mood and provokes a response. Hemingway treats 
certain regions with particular affection, the mountains and the drift of the Gulf 
Stream, for example. There the characters breathe more freely; in the valleys or 
swamps there is a feeling of brooding depression. The description of place is 
handled with great care and with the artist's perceptiveness. Sometimes the reader 
is made to see contours and landmarks as if he were a gunner appraising a target; 
at other times the treatment is suggestive, a series of swift impressions rather than 
a complete picture. For this effect Hemingway uses the technique of the 
impressionist painters whom he admires— patches of color and light, suggestions 
of shape and form that create an atmosphere. Descriptions of place thus add another 
dimension to the story. 

Each of Hemingway's books has been an experiment. In the speech written to 
acknowledge the Nobel prize, Hemingway said, "For a true writer, each book 
should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond 
attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that 
others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed" 
(Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, by Carlos Baker, p. 293). In his stories he has 
shown young men faced too soon with the prospect of violent death; disillusioned 
men, young and middle-aged; men with a tough capacity to take life's blows and 
endure; men who evade issues with cheap tricks; men crude and brutal in speech; 
and men whose speech is full of quiet dignity. Some readers have complained that 
Hemingway's books are immoral, lacking in respect for human values. 
Hemingway is not a moralist; he does not preach. Yet certain values become 
apparent. It is clear that he admires strength of will as well as of body, courage, 
steadfastness, endurance, hard work, simplicity, and skill. He values love, dignity, 
self-respect, beauty, nobility, and humility. Not everyone will like his 
interpretation of these, but as Hemingway would say, the remedy is simple: no one 
need read the books that he dislikes. 


THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA 

In The Old Man and the Sea Hemingway presents old age facing life and 
death with courage, hope, and wisdom. For all its apparent simplicity it is a work 
of consummate art. It was after its publication that Hemingway was awarded the 
Nobel prize. It suggests a short story rather than a novel in its limited number of 
characters, the economy of treatment, and the unity of its effect. In its emotion, the 
rhythm of its expression, its capturing of mood, and its perceptiveness, it is a prose 
poem, reminiscent of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. " 

Though the book was not published until 1952, the germ or seed of the story was 
in Hemingway's mind at least fifteen years earlier. "The book is fiction based on many 
actual occurrences," he has said. Among these occurrences may be his own 
experiences fishing for marlin in Caribbean waters. He acquired a reputation for 
bringing his fish in quickly before sharks had time to damage them, but Life magazine 
(September 22, 1952) published a photograph that showed him with a marlin partially 
destroyed by sharks. The nucleus of the old man's experience is recorded in an article 
by Hemingway in Esquire (April, 1936) and reprinted by Carlos Baker in his study of 
Hemingway: 

An old man fishing alone in a skiff out of Cabanas hooked a great marlin that, 
on the heavy sash-cord handline, pulled the skiff far out to sea. Two days later the 
old man was picked up by fishermen 60 miles to the eastward, the head and the 
forward part of the marlin lashed alongside. What was left of the fish, less than 
half, weighed 800 pounds. 'The old man had stayed with him a day, a night, a day 
and another night while the fish swam deep and pulled the boat. When he had 
come up the old man had pulled the boat up on him and harpooned him. Lashed 
alongside the sharks had hit him and the old man had fought them out alone in the 
Gulf Stream in a skiff, clubbing them, stabbing at them, lunging at them with an 
oar until he was exhausted and the sharks had eaten all they could hold. He was 
crying in the boat when the fishermen picked him up, half crazy from his loss, 
and the sharks were still circling the boat (p. 294). 

Baker comments that as early as 1939 Hemingway wanted to write the story of 
the old fisherman. Baker adds that originally this episode was intended to form a part 
of a longer novel, perhaps one that Hemingway spoke of as having for subject the 
land, the sea, and the air. In itself, however, The Old Man and the Sea is complete. 
The creating of the story from the one-paragraph account in the magazine reveals 
many facets of the novelist's integrating art. The paragraph tells the story flatly, giving 
all the events equal importance. In the novel there must be what Hemingway calls 
architecture: the characters must be involved in a situation that leads through conflict 
to a climax of some sort. People must be presented, by a statement of simple facts or 
in depth, by probing or revealing. Certain aspects of character or incident will be 
emphasized to suit the writer's purpose. None of this must be too obvious. 
Hemingway has said, "I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a 


real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would 
mean many things" (Time magazine, December 13, 1954, p. 72). 

The old man's search for his fish, his success, and his loss incorporate many of 
Hemingway's favorite ingredients. There is a feat requiring physical strength, skill, 
experience, courage, and endurance. Santiago has the qualities that Hemingway 
has admired in the best of his men of action. Like them, Santiago is proud, but old 
age has mellowed him. He has learned that humility can exist side by side with 
true pride. Though failure is bitter, he faces it and accepts its pain, as he has 
accepted loneliness. Beyond the suffering and disappointment, the old man sees 
hope, "Hope is the duty of man. " In this endurance and hope there is dignity, a 
combination of strength and gentleness. In Santiago, Hemingway seems to say, we 
see what good old age is like, wise and seasoned, with an indestructible core. 

All good novels do more than tell a story. As we watch characters responding 
to situations, we have an increasing awareness of life itself. Other dimensions are 
added to The Old Man and the Sea by the treatment of the old man's relationships 
with the boy, with the sea, with the creatures of the sea, and with himself. In the 
construction of the story the old man is seen with the boy at the beginning and at 
the end. For the rest of the time he is alone with the sea and its creatures. The very 
moving relationship between Santiago and the boy is shown through conversation 
that is distinguished by its tact and courtesy. The old man makes the boy feel 
mature and responsible. The boy, in turn, is protector as well as pupil, providing 
refreshment, companionship, and hope. In a sense, the child is the father of the 
man. Without him, however, Santiago is not achingly lonely. Like so many of 
Hemingway's men, he finds his mind good company. He relives his experiences 
and thinks about the sea, the creatures that travel under it and over it, the successes 
and failures of his life, and those baseball players with whose lives he feels an 
affinity. 

The sea of the story lies out beyond Havana, Cuba. It is vast, majestic, and 
timeless, calm for much of the year, feeling the benign influences of the trade 
winds and the Gulf Stream. The old man loves its beauty, power, and mystery. 
"He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish 
when they love her" (p. 21 of the text). Hemingway has testified to his own feeling 
about the timelessness and majesty of the Gulf Stream in a passage in Green Hills 
of Africa (pp. 148—150). The old man shares the writer's conviction that the things 
a man alone with the Gulf Stream finds out about it and about those, that have 
always lived in it are permanent and of value. 

On this timeless stream the old man spends most of his waking hours. He says, 
"It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers" (p. 65). For him most of 
the creatures of the sea are brothers; to kill them is justifiable if there is need or if 
there has been a fair contest; “…they are not as intelligent as we who kill them; 
although they are more noble and more able" (p. 53). This romantic attitude 
toward animals is found again and again in Hemingway's writing. There is often 
the suggestion that men who hunt noble beasts are turning away from a complex 
and corrupt civilization to contact with nobler creatures. Often the beasts seem 


nobler than the men. For the old fisherman, this oversimplification seems fitting; it 
is the result of his experience. Elsewhere it is Hemingway's form of mysticism, an 
attitude like that found in the great cave drawings of splendid animals. 

The killing of noble creatures should be done skillfully and cleanly; otherwise, 
there is a form of treachery. This feeling is shared by Santiago and all 
Hemingway's skilled hunters and fighters. The question of treachery and the 
debate about killing and whether or not it is a sin run through Hemingway's books. 
There are treacherous men and creatures, treacherous not only toward others but in 
the fundamental betrayal of themselves. Often the traitors are beautiful, like the 
man-of-war jellyfish with its poisonous sting or the bullfighter who, with slick 
grace and theatrical flourishes, cheats while evading danger. Sometimes they are 
ugly, like the shark, the squid, or Pablo in For Whom the Bell Tolls. 

Clean destruction carried out with concentration, skill, and energy does not 
usually involve treachery or break the relationship between man and animal or 
even man and man. But there may be treachery even in a clean killing if a man 
tackles something too far above or beyond him. The old man keeps returning to 
the question of sin in killing the noble marlin of the great deep. "I went too far 
out," he says repeatedly. Perhaps there is a suggestion here of what the Greeks 
called hubris, presumptuous man violating the great mysteries of nature, as 
Prometheus did when he snatched fire from the heavens and was punished by the 
gods. Coleridge makes use of the idea when his Ancient Mariner kills the albatross, 
and the Canadian poet E. J. Pratt in The Titanic points out the presumption of the 
builders of the ocean liner in defying the power of the sea. 

Whatever the interpretation, Hemingway's treatment of the sea and of the 
great fish adds scope to the story. It is almost an allegory on the life of man. 
Carlos Baker has called attention to the marks on the old man's hands and to the 
posture of a crucified figure as he lies on his bed after his experience. "No good book 
has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stack in," 
Hemingway has said, but he points out that a tale truly told can mean many things 
(Time, December, 13, 1954, p. 72). It is interesting to note that, as the Ancient Mariner 
found release from his agony in telling his story, the old man is soothed by his 
conversation with the boy. In the last sentence of the book he returns to his dream of the 
lions. 

The style of The Old Man and the Sea, so simple on the surface, is subtle and 
beautiful. It has the economy of poetry, with every detail contributing to the effect. In 
this prose there is a rhythmic quality, created by the strong undercurrent of emotion, 
by repetitions in the ritual of the old man's life, and by the refrains in dialogue, 
dreams, and memories. Sentences and language give the effect of clean simplicity that 
is suitable for the old man. Obviously this is necessary when he speaks, but 
Hemingway has seen to it that the narrative passages make no abrupt break to remind 
the reader of another presence. Even in the descriptive passages the old man's point of 
view is maintained. Words are used with skill. The old man's Spanish is suggested by 
occasional words in that language and by the order and cadence of the sentences. 
Technical words for the implements of the fisherman's trade give an added touch of 


realism, and the point of view of the experienced fisherman is maintained in the 
references to wind and weather, birds and fish. 

In the architecture of this short novel there are thus many evidences of careful 
craftsmanship. Perhaps the best test of the writer's skill is the reader's acceptance of 
these as natural. In unity of design, character-drawing, knowledge, and style lies the 
artistry of the book.