Along different points in my life, I have been considered argumentative. That is probably accurate. I cannot hide from this fact, and neither will I attempt to decorate it up with vacuous banalities. It should be given a <KISS>. Keep it simple, stupid.
While attending the University of Arkansas, I remember two “discussions” I had with my professors of Fiction and Practical Criticism. The first informed the class he considered The Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald as the greatest, most perfect book ever written in the English language. When no one in the class piped up, I told him I thought it was too simple and I considered it swill.
The second professor taught Practical Criticism and wanted us to look at a work through the lens of Mimetic Criticism where reality is considered the context. Again, all the other students remained silent, accepting the word of the educated man with several letters behind his name as gospel truth. I raised my hand. When he acknowledged me, I told him it didn’t matter what the context was. He might have been a little shocked—I know the other students thought I had just ripped up a picture of the pope on live television.
When he asked me to explain, I told him the lens through which we looked at a work did not matter in the end because each person will look at it through a lens different from that of all the others. If we looked at reality as the context as he asked us to, my reality was different from that of my classmates. None of them had served in the US Navy. None of them had been run over by an 18-wheeler loaded with 40 tons of charcoal, stopping their heart twice where the jumper cables had to be applied. None of them had been caught in a riptide off the Pacific coast of Mexico and nearly drowned. Our experiences dictate our realities. And they are all different.
My favorite book of all time is Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Published in 1952, the seed that flowered into the book may have been from an article attributed to Hemingway that appeared in Esquire magazine April 1936. It was about an old man that was picked up by the coast guard after hooking a marlin and being dragged out to sea for two days before being rescued.
Though many critics of the day opined it to be inferior to Hemingway’s other works, it was the only work mentioned by the Swedish Academy when they presented him with the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1954. I have never been much of a conformist and tend to think some of these critics might have been a little jealous. To borrow a line from the Bard himself: The [critic] doth protest too much, methinks.
So many people think it is about struggle. The old man’s struggles against the infirmity of age, against nature, against defeat, against the sea as a representation of the world itself. Though it contains pieces of all those themes, I say rather it is about legacy. Not only that, it is also about growing up and learning what you can do to help you when you strike out on your own.
The story is most definitely about the old man, an aged fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without a successful catch. During the first forty days, a young boy helped him, but his parents made him go out on day forty-one with another boat. In that boat, he caught three marketable fish in the first week. But the experiences of the old man provides the catalyst for change.
Each day, when the old man returned empty handed, the boy went down to help him carry the equipment or the sail, the sail that “looked like the flag of permanent defeat.” Here is where people get lazy, in my opinion, and think the book is about the struggle with the inevitability of defeat.
I say look deeper. The boy was told by his parents to not help the old man because he was “unlucky.” But we see the embers of rebellion, of independence, shining through in the actions of the boy. We even hear it in the first words the boy says to the old man:
“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.
Santiago knows the boy means well. The boy even told him, “It was papa made me leave. I am a boy and I must obey him.” This right here is the change of which I am speaking, the character change and growth that occurs in the book. It is not the old man who changes. He is a constant. He is always there, just as the sea is always there, just as his skiff is always there, just as the Terrace where all the fishermen gather and drink beer is always there.
After Santiago suffers the trials and tribulations he does—many critics have pointed to Christian symbolism in the tale—he emerges from the sea and is nursed back to health with the help of the boy. There are specific lines at almost the end of the story illustrating why I think the tale is about legacy:
“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 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.”
At this point, the boy left his mother and his father and struck out on his own. He made decisions for himself. He decided he still needed to learn more about the sea and all the things it held. This book is about legacy, the legacy Santiago is leaving the boy, the legacy the boy seeks to learn to become his own person, the legacy of the sea.
