Analysis
The narrator tells us that Santiago does not mention the
hawks that await the little warbler because he thinks the bird will
learn about them “soon enough.” Hemingway tempers the grimness of
Santiago’s observation with Santiago’s feeling of deep connection
with the warbler. He suggests that the world, though designed to
bring about death, is a vast, interconnected network of life. Additionally, the
warbler’s feeling of exhaustion and its ultimate fate—destruction
by predators—mirror Santiago’s own eventual exhaustion and the marlin’s
ravishment by sharks.
The brotherhood between Santiago and the surrounding world extends
beyond the warbler. The old man feels an intimate connection to
the great fish, as well as to the sea and stars. Santiago constantly
pledges his love, respect, and sentiment of brotherhood to the marlin.
For this reason, the fish’s death is not portrayed as senselessly
tragic. Santiago, and seemingly Hemingway, feel that since death must come
in the world, it is preferable that it come at the hands of a worthy
opponent. The old man’s magnificence—the honor and humility with
which he executes his task—elevates his struggle to a rarified,
even transcendent level.
Skills that involved great displays of strength captured Hemingway’s
imagination, and his fiction is filled with fishermen, big-game
hunters, bullfighters, prizefighters, and soldiers. Hemingway’s
fiction presents a world peopled almost exclusively by men—men who
live most successfully in the world through displays of skill. In
Hemingway’s world, mere survival is not enough. To elevate oneself
above the masses, one must master the rules and rituals by which
men are judged. Time and again, we see Santiago displaying the art
and the rituals that make him a master of his trade. Only his lines
do not drift carelessly in the current; only he braves
waters so far from shore.
Rules and rituals dominate the rest of the old man’s life
as well. When he is not thinking about fishing, his mind turns to
religion or baseball. Because Santiago declares that he is not a
religious man, his prayers to the Virgin of Cobre seem less an appeal
to a supernatural divinity and more a habit that orders and provides
a context for his daily experience. Similarly, Santiago’s worship
of Joe DiMaggio, and his constant comparisons between the baseball
great and himself, suggest his preference for worlds in which men
are measured by a clear set of standards. The great DiMaggio’s reputation
is secured by his superlative batting average as surely as Santiago’s
will be by an eighteen-foot marlin.
Even though Santiago doesn’t consider himself a religious
man, it is during his struggle with the marlin that the book becomes strongly
suggestive of a Christian parable. As his struggle intensifies, Santiago
begins to seem more and more Christ-like: through his pain, suffering,
and eventual defeat, he will transcend his previous incarnation
as a failed fisherman. Hemingway achieves this effect by relying
on the potent and, to many readers, familiar symbolism identified
with Jesus Christ’s life and death. The cuts on the old man’s hands
from the fishing line recall the stigmata—the crucifixion wounds
of Jesus. Santiago’s isolation, too, evokes that of Christ, who
spent forty days alone in the wilderness. Having taken his boat out
on the ocean farther than any other fisherman has ever gone, Santiago
is beyond even the fringes of society.
Hemingway also unites the old man with marlin through
Santiago’s frequent expressions of his feeling of kinship. He thus
suggests that the fate of one is the fate of the other. Although
they are opponents, Santiago and the marlin are also partners, allies,
and, in a sense, doubles. Thus, the following passage, which links
the marlin to Christ, implicitly links Santiago to Christ as well:
