Psycho socially therapeutic aspects of The old Man and the Sea This exceptional story should be used as a therapeutic aid for hopeless and depressed people who needed a powerful force for continuing struggles of life against fate. They should say as the boy Manolin, ‘I’ll bring the luck by myself.’ In the story the old man tells us ‘It is silly not to hope… besides I believe it is a sin.’ Hemingway draws a distinction between two different types of success: outer-material and inner-spiritual. While the old man lacks the former, the importance of this lack is eclipsed by his possession of the later. He teaches all people the triumph of indefatigable spirit over exhaustible resources. Hemingway’s hero as a perfectionist man tells us: To be a man is to behave with honor and dignity, not to succumb to suffering, to accept one’s duties without complaint, and most importantly to have maximum self-control.
At the end of the story he mentions, ‘A man is not made for defeat… a man can be destroyed but not defeated.’ The book finishes with this symbolic sentence: ‘The old man was dreaming about lions.’ It is a psychological analysis of Hemingway famous story that we have used it as a psychotherapeutic aid for hopeless and depressed people and also psychological victims of war in a more comprehensive therapeutic plan. The first sentence of the book announces itself as Hemingway’s: ‘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’. The words are plain, and the structure, two tightly-worded independent clauses conjoined by a simple conjunction, is ordinary, traits which characterize Hemingway’s literary style.
Santiago is the protagonist of the novella. He is an old in Cuba who, when we meet him at the beginning of the book, has not caught anything for eighty-four days. The novella follows Santiago’s quest for the great catch that will save his career. Santiago endures a great struggle with a uncommonly large and noble marlin only to lose the fish to rapacious sharks on his way back to land. Despite this loss, Santiago ends the novel with his spirit undefeated. Some have said that Santiago represents Hemingway himself, searching for his next great book, an Everyman, heroic in the face of human tragedy, or the Oedipal male unconscious trying to slay his father, the marlin, in order to sexually possess his mother, the sea.
We are told that after forty days Manolin’s parents decided that ‘the old man was now and definitely salad, which is the worst form of unlucky’. This sentence proclaims one of the novel’s themes, the heroic struggle against unchangeable fate. Indeed, the entire first paragraph emphasizes Santiago’s apparent lack of success. For example, ‘It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty.’ And most powerfully, ‘The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat’. This type of descriptive degradation of Santiago continues with details of his old, worn body. Even his scars, legacies of past successes, are ‘old as erosion’s in a fish less desert’.
All this changes suddenly, though, when Hemingway says masterfully, ‘Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated’. This draws attention to a dichotomy between two different types of success: outer, material success and inner, spiritual success… Also, Santiago’s eye color foreshadows Hemingway’s increasingly explicit likening of Santiago to the sea, suggesting an analogy between Santiago’s indomitable spirit and the sea’s boundless strength.’ The old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him’. Manolin is Santiago’s apprentice, but their relationship is not restricted to business alone. Manolin idolizes Santiago as we are meant to but the object of this idolization is not only the once great though presently failed fisherman; it is an idolization of ideals. This helps explain Manolin’s unique, almost religious, devotion to the old man, underscored when Manolin begs Santiago’s pardon for his not fishing with the old man anymore.
Manolin says, ‘It was Papa made me leave. I am a boy and I must obey him,’ to which Santiago replies, ‘I know… It is quite normal. He hasn’t much faith’.
Despite the clear hierarchy of this teacher / student relationship, Santiago does stress his equality with the boy. When Manolin asks to buy the old man a beer, Santiago replies, ‘Why not? … Between fisherman’. And when Manolin asks to help Santiago with his fishing, Santiago replies, ‘You are already a man’. By demonstrating that Santiago has little more to teach the boy, this equality foreshadows the impending separation of the two friends, and also indicates that this will not be a story about a young boy learning from an old man, but a story of an old man learning the unique lessons of the autumn of life. In fact unity us one of main themes of the story.
Hemingway spends a good deal of time drawing connections between Santiago and his natural environment: the fish, birds, and stars are all his brothers or friends, he has the heart of a turtle, eats turtle eggs for strength, drinks shark liver oil for health, etc. Also, apparently contradictory elements are repeatedly shown as aspects of one unified whole: the sea is both kind and cruel, feminine and masculine, the Portuguese man of war is beautiful but deadly, the mako shark is noble but a cruel, etc. The novella’s premise of unity helps succor Santiago in the midst of his great tragedy. For Santiago, success and failure are two equal facets of the same existence. They are transitory forms which capriciously arrive and depart without affecting the underlying unity between himself and nature. As long as he focuses on this unity and sees himself as part of nature rather than as an external antagonist competing with it, he cannot be defeated by whatever misfortunes befall him.
This ecstatic, almost erotic, imagery stands in stark contrast to the careful art of fishing we see later in the novel. The fact the fishing requires both calm detachment and violent engagement (a kind of masculine flourish) further illustrates the unity of a world which both oppresses man and out of which the strength to resist that oppression comes. Hemingway also peppers the novella with numerous references to sight. We are told, for instance, that Santiago has uncannily good eyesight for a man of his age and experience. When Manolin notices this, Santiago replies simply, ‘I am a strange old man’. Given the previously mentioned analogy between Santiago’s eyes and the sea, one suspects that his strangeness in this regard has something to do with his relationship to the sea.
This connection, though, is somewhat problematic as it might suggest that Santiago would have success as a fisherman. The simplicity of Santiago’s house further develops our view of Santiago as materially unsuccessful. It is interesting, though, that Hemingway draws attention to the relics of Santiago’s wife in his house, presenting an aspect of Santiago which is otherwise absent throughout the novel. This is significant because it suggests a certain completeness to Santiago’s character which Santiago’s almost childlike dream of playful lions symbols of male strength and virility before his voyage is also a gesture of Santiago’s second youth.
There is a premium placed on masculinity and the obligations of manhood. When Santiago wakes Manolin up to help him off, the tired boy says simply, ‘Que va… It is what a man must do’. As for what this manhood entails, perhaps the most illustrative thing Hemingway says so far is in his characterization of Santiago’s humility. Hemingway says of Santiago, ‘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’.
Humility and the acceptance of obligation, then, appear to be marks of manhood, a concept Hemingway will flesh out through the course of the novella. Santiago’s start into the sea is an excellent demonstration of Hemingway’s descriptive art in its successive engagement of various senses. First, there is smell: ‘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’. Next, there is sight: ‘He saw the phosphorescence of the Gulf weed in the water’. And lastly, there is hearing: ‘… He heard the trembling sound as the flying fish left the water’.
This use of different sensory imagery helps create a powerful description of the sea. As the novella’s title might indicate, the sea is to play a very important role in the narrative, and Hemingway’s exquisite introduction of the sea, signals that importance. As its title suggests, the sea is central character in the novella. Most of the story takes place on the sea, and Santiago is constantly identified with it and its creatures; his sea-colored eyes reflect both the sea’s tranquillity and power, and its inhabitants are his brothers. Santiago refers to the sea as a woman, and the sea seems to represent the feminine complement to Santiago’s masculinity. The sea might also be seen as the unconscious from which creative ideas are drawn.
Santiago muses about the fragility of the birds he sees. He says, ‘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… .’ .
This dichotomy in the sea’s temperament is further illustrated by Santiago’s gendered explanation of the sea’s many faces. According to Santiago, people refer to the sea as a woman when they love her. When they view her as a enemy and rival, though, they refer to her as a man. Santiago ‘always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favors, and if she did wild or wicked makes him more of an Everyman appropriate for an allegory but mentioning it simply to remove it from the stage makes its absence even more noteworthy, and one might question whether the character of Santiago is too roughly drawn to allow the reader to fully identify with his story. There is an interesting irony in the inversion of roles between the paternal tutor Santiago and the pupil Manolin. While Santiago took care of Manolin on the water by teaching him how to fish, Manolin takes care of Santiago on land by, for example, making sure the old man eats.
When Santiago wants to fish without eating, Santiago assumes a parental tone and declares, ‘You ” ll not fish without eating while I’m alive.’ To which Santiago replies half-jokingly, ‘Then live a long time and take care of yourself’. This inversion sets up the ensuing narrative by making the old Santiago a youth again, ready to receive the wisdom of his quest. things it was because she could not help them’. Despite the chauvinism characteristic of Hemingway, this view of the ocean is important in that it indicates that while the sea may bring fortune or ruin, the sea is unitary.
It is not sometimes one thing and sometimes another. The good and the bad, or what people perceive as the good and the bad, are all equal parts of this greater unity. The gendered view also suggests an alternative conception of unity, unity between the masculine and the feminine. As the descriptions of those who view the sea as a man are cast in a negative light, one might argue that the story is repudiation of a homo social world of competitive masculinity.
Man and man will always yield strife; man and woman, Santiago and the sea, complement each other and create a peaceable unity. The representation of the feminine, though, in so abstract a context problematizes this judgment, especially when the only flesh and blood woman we see in the story, the tourist at the very end, is supposed to upset us.’ … I keep them with precision. Only I have no more luck anymore. But who knows? Maybe today.
Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready’…
He had maintained the precision and exactitude of his previous works in the work. That this was not appreciated was a matter of luck or, one might assume, the caprice of literary tastes. In light of this interpretation, The Old Man and the Sea is frequently read as a symbolic fictionalization of Hemingway’s own quest for his next great catch, his next great book. Santiago’s statement that his eyes adjust to the sun during different parts of the day furnishes another example of the importance of sight and visual imagery in the novella. Santiago says, ‘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 just painful’. Given the likening of natural time cycles to human age, e.
g. September as the autumn of life, it is plausible to read this passage as a statement of the edifying power of age. While it is difficult to find one’s way in the morning of youth, this task becomes easier when done by those who have lived through the day into the evening of life. About the turtles, Santiago says ‘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’. This identification is important as it corroborates our understanding of Santiago’s indomitability, the quality of undefeated-ness Hemingway noted early in the novella; with his body destroyed, his heart, his spirit, will fight on.
This foreshadows the harrowing task Santiago is about to face with the marlin. Also, Hemingway tells us that Santiago eats turtle eggs for strength and drinks shark liver oil for health. In this way, he internalizes the characteristics of the sea and adopts them as his own. The episode in which Santiago talks to himself on the ocean can be taken to corroborate the autobiographical interpretation of the novella. Santiago’s speech is really Hemingway’s thought; the old fisherman figuratively sails the author’s unconscious, represented in Freudian symbolism by the sea, in an attempt to pull forth the great story from its inchoate depths. According to this view, everything takes place within Hemingway’s mind, a self-referential allegory of the heroic artist ‘Now it is time to think of only one thing.
That which I was born for’ searching for greatness in a world which seeks to deprive him of it. That the fishermen call all the fish tuna and only differentiate between them when they sell them is at once a statement of the theme of unity and a repudiation of the market. It is not ignorance the underlies this practice, but rather a simplifying though not simplistic appreciation of the unity of the sea. There are fish and there are fisherman; those who are caught and those who catch.
This distillation of parts heightens the allegorical quality of the novel. The market forces the fisherman to forget this symbolic binary relationship and focus on differentiation, requiring a multiplication of the terms of difference. As the novella stakes out a position of privileging unity, this market-driven divisionism come across negatively. This makes sense in light of Hemingway’s previously mentioned anger at the unappreciative literary audience for his previous effort. The next section begins Santiago’s pursuit of the hooked marlin, and there is a good deal of simple description of the mechanics of catching such a fish.
This helps create a sense of narrative authenticity, the clean conveyance of reality for which Hemingway assiduously strove. For instance, Hemingway’s description of the marlin’s initial nibbling on the bait utilizes the same phrases again and again, e. g. ‘delicate pulling.’ While this may express the actual event perfectly, the repetition creates a distancing effect, pushing the prose more toward poetry and less towards realistic objectivity.
As noted before, this heightens the allegorical quality of the narrative, which, at least explicitly, Hemingway denied. The unanimous response with which Santiago’s thoughts of loneliness are met is another expression of the theme of unity in the novella. Santiago thinks to himself, ‘No one should be alone in their old age… But it is unavoidable’.
As if in response to this, Hemingway introduces a pair of friendly dolphins in the very next paragraph. ‘They are good,’ says Santiago. ‘They make jokes and love on another. They are our brothers like the flying fish’.
Then, as if on cue, Santiago begins to feel sorry for the marlin he has hooked. This pity for the great fish is intensified when Santiago recalls seeing the misery of a male marlin after he had caught its mate. Saddened deeply by this demonstration of devotion, Santiago and Manolin, with whom he was fishing, ‘begged her pardon and butchered her promptly’. : This heroic angle is played up even more when Santiago ends these reflection by thinking, ‘Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman… But that was the thing I was born for’ Again, this emphasis on fate is typical of heroic stories, especially tragedies.
Interestingly, one might also read this statement of fate as an expression of Santiago’s own place in a symbolic story about the writing process itself. Santiago, a product of Hemingway’s authorial imagination, was born to play the role he has in the narrative. In this way, the character’s succumbing to fate is a comment on the creative process by which the author controls the destiny of his or her characters. Santiago’s identification with and affection for the marlin increases the longer he is with the fish. In order to convince’ the fish to be caught and to steel himself for his difficult task, Santiago says, ‘Fish, …
I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you before this day ends’. Soon after, Santiago tells the bird that has landed on his boat that he cannot help because he is ‘with a friend’. And later, Santiago goes as far as to wish that he could feed the marlin, calling it his brother. The cramping of Hemingway’s left hand is interesting First, it creates tension by debilitating the protagonist even more, making failure more likely and so his triumph sweeter. Second, if we accept the autobiographical reading of the novella, it can be a symbol for writers block.
This is importantly different from Hemingway’s previous attempts to blame the readers for his recent lack of success. Now, suddenly, the fault is his own. But not fully. The hand reacts in spite of its possessor’s intention, and Santiago speaks to his hand as if it operated independently of himself.
This certainly makes the question of who is responsible for Hemingway’s failures more complicated. In addition, Santiago’s response to the cramp also affords us an opportunity to investigate Hemingway’s conception of manhood. As Hemingway writes, ‘ It is humiliating before others to have a diarrhea 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’. A man’s sense of humiliation does not depend exclusively on the presence (or imagined presence) of others who would look upon him with disgust or disdain. It rests on an internal standard of dignity, one which privileges above all control over one’s self.
It is not only inconvenient or frustrating that Santiago’s hand cramped, it is, as Santiago says, ‘unworthy of it to be cramped’. This concern with worthiness is a important to the novel. Santiago’s concerns about his own worthiness come to a head when he finally beholds the fish he is tracking. When Santiago finally catches a glimpse of.