Old Man and the Sea

¶ … Old Man and the Sea Baseball & Fishing Provide the Net, but Hemingway has the Hook For those who think Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea is a story about baseball, they are partly correct. And for those who think it is a fishing story, they are on the right track too. And still other readers who see this as a metaphor for growing old - juxtaposing youth (Manolin) and age (Santiago) - in Cuba or anywhere, they have something going for them too.

But in this wonderful story about a Cuban fisherman who first goes without a fish for 84 days and then catches one that's too big to handle, baseball and fishing are just tools that Hemingway uses to capture the reader's emotions.

Much like a fisherman has a net to assure that he will land the fish he has hooked, Hemingway's baseball and fishing allegories are like the net to bring the reader up to the boat of deeper understanding, once the reader's been hooked into reading the story in the first place.

When reading the story, a baseball fan who has been around for awhile - or who has studied the great teams and great players of the past - is immediately hooked into tale, because the novel begins and ends with baseball. Santiago's little apprentice, Manolin, has been told by his parents not to go out fishing with a man who has such bad luck, but he wants to go anyway; Santiago tells him "No. Go and play baseball" (p. 12).

Moreover, readers learn that while Manolin's parents don't have much faith in Santiago, in fact Santiago doesn't have much faith in religion. On page 17, Santiago tells the boy to "have faith in the Yankees, my son." It seems that baseball has been Santiago's religion, perhaps filling in for God and Christianity; on page 103-04, when Santiago thrusts the harpoon into the shark, he says thinking "is all I have left. That and baseball." With a little bit of research a reader learns that baseball is hugely popular in Cuba.

Even Fidel Castro played professional baseball at one time. All little kids growing up play in the streets, or in back yards, or if they're lucky to be near a park, they play there. Hemingway understood the connections between baseball, Cuba, and the struggle to stay alive (old age) and to survive (by fishing or any other vocation). The only thing young about Santiago was his eyes, Hemingway wrote - but an alert reader knows that baseball is for the young at heart, age notwithstanding.

And also, any baseball fan worth his salt knows that the Yankees had a great player named DiMaggio (Joe), who had his own struggles. Those comparisons of DiMaggio and Santiago are part of the meat of the book. While certainly DiMaggio had hall-of-fame credentials, he also had his share of injuries (including a painful bone spur). Like Santiago, DiMaggio had bad luck (someone stole his bat during the middle of his 56-game hitting streak in 1941, which still stands today).

And Santiago can keep his mind off his bad luck (84 days without catching a fish) by thinking about baseball. Santiago wants to be "worthy of the great DiMaggio, who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel.. [and] What is a bone spur?" (p. 68).

Santiago wonders what if DiMaggio were out there in a boat alone, and a huge marlin - with a "sword...as long as a baseball bat" - was giving him more fight than he could handle? Would the great Joe DiMaggio "...stay with a fish as long as I will stay with this one?" (p. 68). Conclusion: Hemingway has hooked the reader with all of his descriptive narrative, with his dramatic plot, and.