From Manolin bringing the old man coffee to the old
man’s return to sleep to dream, once again, about the lions
Summary
Early the next morning, Manolin comes to the old man’s
shack, and the sight of his friend’s ravaged hands brings him to
tears. He goes to fetch coffee. Fishermen have gathered around Santiago’s
boat and measured the carcass at eighteen feet. Manolin waits for
the old man to wake up, keeping his coffee warm for him so it is
ready right away. When the old man wakes, he and Manolin talk warmly.
Santiago says that the sharks beat him, and Manolin insists that
he will work with the old man again, regardless of what his parents
say. He reveals that there had been a search for Santiago involving
the coast guard and planes. Santiago is happy to have someone to
talk to, and after he and Manolin make plans, the old man sleeps
again. Manolin leaves to find food and the newspapers for the old
man, and to tell Pedrico that the marlin’s head is his. That afternoon
two tourists at the terrace café mistake the great skeleton for
that of a shark. Manolin continues to watch over the old man as
he sleeps and dreams of the lions.
Analysis
Given the depth of Santiago’s tragedy—most likely Santiago
will never have the opportunity to catch another such fish in his
lifetime—The Old Man and the Sea ends on a rather
optimistic note. Santiago is reunited with Manolin, who desperately
wants to complete his training. All of the old man’s noble qualities
and, more important, the lessons he draws from his experience, will
be passed on to the boy, which means that the fisherman’s life will continue
on, in some form, even after his death. The promise of triumph and
regeneration is supported by the closing image of the book. For
the third time, Santiago returns to his dream of the lions at play
on the African beaches. As an image that recalls the old man’s youth,
the lions suggest the circularity of life. They also suggest the
harmony—the lions are, after all, playing—that exists between the
opposing forces of nature.
The hope that Santiago clings to at the novella’s
close is not the hope that comes from naïveté. It is, rather, a
hope that comes from experience, of something new emerging from
something old, as a phoenix rises out of the ashes. The novella
states as much when Santiago reflects that “a man can be destroyed
but not defeated.” The destruction of the marlin is not a defeat
for Santiago; rather, it leads to his redemption. Indeed, the fishermen who
once mocked him now stand in awe of him. The decimation of the marlin,
of course, is a significant loss. The sharks strip Santiago of his
greater glory as surely as they strip the great fish of its flesh.
But to view the shark attack as precipitating only loss is to see
but half the picture. When Santiago says, “Fishing kills me exactly
as it keeps me alive,” he is pointing, once again, to the vast,
necessary, and ever-shifting tension that exists between loss and
gain, triumph and defeat, life and death.
In the final pages of the novella, Hemingway
employs a number of images that link Santiago to Christ, the model
of transcendence, who turned loss into gain, defeat into triumph,
and even death into new life. Hemingway unabashedly paints the old
man as a crucified martyr: as soon as the sharks arrive, the narrator comments
that the noise Santiago made resembled the noise one would make
“feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.” The narrator’s
description of Santiago’s return to town also recalls the crucifixion.
As the old man struggles up the hill with his mast across his shoulders,
the reader cannot help but recall Christ’s march toward Calvary.
Even the position in which he collapses on his bed—he sleeps facedown
on the newspapers with his arms out straight and the palms of his
hands up—brings to mind the image of Christ suffering on the cross.
