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The Other Paula @[email protected] · 2026-09-29 · 21:20 UTC

My First Encounter with Hemingway, Unfortunately Involving Fishing: On Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea

September 29, 2026

I bought The Old Man and the Sea sometime last year, placed it on the shelf, and proceeded to ignore it. Hemingway had always been one of those enormous literary names I knew I would eventually have to confront, almost out of obligation. Melville, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Hemingway. The Mount Rushmore effect. Eventually curiosity, guilt over an unread purchase, and the convenient fact that the book is barely more than a hundred pages won out. I finished it in perhaps two sittings.

And now I am not entirely sure what I think of it.

This was my first Hemingway, which may have been the first mistake. The Old Man and the Sea is short, famous, Nobel-adjacent, Pulitzer-winning, endlessly discussed in literary and reading circles, and therefore looks like the obvious doorway into Hemingway. It may not be. For long stretches, I felt as though I were reading an extremely detailed account of fishing written for someone who already understood why fishing mattered. Lines, hooks, currents, bait, birds, the positioning of the hands, the movement of the fish beneath the water. There are no chapters to provide even the psychological illusion of progress. Santiago goes to sea, hooks an enormous marlin, and then the ordeal begins.

That is essentially the plot.

Santiago is an old Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without catching anything. Once considered terribly unlucky, he sets out alone and hooks a marlin so enormous that instead of hauling it toward the boat, the fish begins pulling him farther out to sea. For days the old man endures hunger, exhaustion, cramped hands, wounds, sleeplessness, and solitude while developing an almost mystical respect for the creature he intends to kill. Eventually he harpoons the marlin and lashes it to his skiff, only for sharks to descend upon it during the journey home. By the time Santiago reaches shore, practically nothing remains except the skeleton.

A triumph reduced to evidence.

That, finally, was where the book began to make sense to me.

I had initially been waiting for psychological revelation, some penetration into Santiago’s inner life beyond the immediate questions of endurance and fishing. I wanted character excavation. Hemingway largely refuses it. Santiago’s psychology is strangely externalized. His character exists in what he does, what he endures, and what he refuses to surrender. He talks to himself because there is nobody else there. He talks to the fish. He talks to birds. He talks about baseball and Joe DiMaggio, who, I learned, was a famous American professional baseball player. His mind circles around pain, hunger, technique, memory, luck, the boy Manolin, and the fish pulling him toward some increasingly abstract confrontation with himself.

There is pride in all of it, certainly. Maybe too much pride.

Santiago does not merely want food. The marlin becomes proof. Proof that he remains what he once was. Proof that age has not entirely conquered him. Proof that eighty-four empty days have not rendered him useless. He wants to catch the fish because catching the fish would vindicate his existence as a fisherman. This gives the story its distinctly masculine quality, at least as I experienced it. There is something almost archaic about it. Man goes into nature. Man encounters magnificent beast. Man suffers. Man conquers beast. Nature retaliates. Man returns wounded but spiritually undefeated. It could have been told beside a fire three thousand years ago.

And perhaps that is precisely the point.

Santiago repeatedly calls the marlin his brother, admires its dignity, marvels at its strength, and yet remains committed to killing it. That contradiction is probably the most interesting psychological element in the book. Love does not prevent destruction. Respect does not cancel violence. Santiago recognizes something of himself in the fish, which makes the killing stranger rather than easier. He kills the thing he most admires because defeating it is how he measures himself.

There is tragedy in that.

The sharks make the tragedy almost cruelly mathematical. Santiago achieves the impossible and then watches the achievement disappear bite by bite. All that suffering, all that magnificent struggle, reduced to a carcass before anyone can properly see what he has done. The marlin begins to resemble ambition itself. Glory cannot be preserved. Victory decomposes. One may conquer something enormous and still return home with almost nothing to show for it.

Except the knowledge that it happened.

The Christian symbolism is difficult to miss once Santiago’s ordeal reaches its end. His wounded hands suggest stigmata. He carries the mast upon his shoulders after returning home, an unmistakably Christlike image. He collapses exhausted and sleeps with his arms outstretched. His suffering acquires the shape of sacrifice. But I do not think Hemingway turns Santiago into Christ in any straightforward religious sense. The symbolism seems less doctrinal than mythic. Santiago suffers so completely that suffering itself becomes transfiguring. The flesh fails, the prize is destroyed, but some interior dignity survives.

This is also where Manolin, the boy in the book, becomes important. I did not feel especially attached to the boy, perhaps because Hemingway gives so little psychological texture to their relationship. Yet his devotion to Santiago supplies the tenderness the book otherwise desperately needs. Manolin brings him food, worries over him, believes in him when others do not, and ultimately chooses loyalty over the judgment of his parents. The old man speaks constantly of wishing the boy were with him. Beneath all the masculine endurance and heroic solitude is a man who does not actually want to be alone.

That detail changed Santiago somewhat for me.

His independence is not absolute. He longs for companionship. He needs Manolin’s affection even if he can survive physically without it. The boy represents continuity, perhaps even immortality of a modest kind. Santiago’s body is deteriorating, but whatever he knows can pass into another person. The old fisherman may lose the marlin, but he has not entirely lost his place in the world.

Hemingway’s prose, meanwhile, is exactly what I had been told Hemingway’s prose would be: stripped down, direct, almost aggressively unornamented. There are moments of tremendous beauty, but Hemingway rarely appears interested in showing off the beauty of a sentence. He would rather make the sentence disappear. After writers who revel in language, this austerity can feel almost suspicious. I sometimes wanted more texture, more psychological intricacy, more verbal pleasure. Instead Hemingway gives nouns and verbs and physical facts. Sea. Fish. Rope. Hand. Blood. Pain.

It is easy to mistake simplicity for shallowness, though, and I suspect I did that occasionally while reading.

The novel’s depth lies less in psychological analysis than in compression. Santiago does not explain himself because his struggle is the explanation. Hemingway seems interested in the ancient philosophical question of what remains when almost everything else has been stripped away. Comfort disappears. Society disappears. Youth disappears. Luck disappears. Eventually even victory disappears. What remains is conduct.

That famous Hemingway ideal of grace under pressure suddenly becomes comprehensible here. Santiago cannot control whether the sharks come. He cannot control his age. He cannot control luck. He cannot even fully control what becomes of the marlin once he has killed it. He can only control how he meets each successive humiliation.

I understand, then, why The Old Man and the Sea is considered great. Understanding greatness, however, is not identical with loving the book.

I admired it more after finishing it than while actually reading it. During the reading itself I often struggled to care about the mechanics of fishing, and Santiago never became fully alive to me in the psychological way that my favorite literary characters do. Perhaps that is unfair. Perhaps Hemingway was doing something deliberately different from the novelists I instinctively prefer. He subtracts where others accumulate. He withholds where others interpret.

Still, as an introduction to Hemingway, I am not convinced this was the right book for me. Maybe I should have started with A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, or even some of the short stories, where human relationships occupy more of the foreground. I am not finished with Hemingway. One novella is hardly enough evidence to convict a writer, much less canonize him.

For now, The Old Man and the Sea remains something peculiar in my reading life: a book I respected without particularly enjoying, a book whose meaning became more interesting only after I had escaped the boat.

Perhaps Santiago would disapprove of that phrasing. Then again, I have never tried fishing.

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#americanliterature #bibliophilia #bookreview #books #classics #ernesthemingway