As Hemingway also states,.".. The old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favors, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought" (30). Moreover, to Santiago, there is something magical about the sea. By contrast, the younger fishermen, those who laugh at Santiago's bad luck, think of her only pragmatically, unromantically, as a means of commerce.
Despite his persistent streak of bad luck, Santiago still tells himself to fish the best he can, out of respect to the sea, and himself. "I could just drift, he thought, and put a bight of line around my toe to wake me. But today is eighty-five days and I should fish the day well" (p. 41). As he fishes, alone but determined, Santiago identifies with some of the bird species he sees on the ocean, especially those that appear small and powerless, like him. Then, however, there are the "robber birds" (29) perhaps equivalent to the aggressive young fishermen who lack Santiago's respect for the sea. Mostly, though, Santiago was "sorry for the birds, especially the small delicate dark terns that were always flying and looking and almost never finding... The birds have a harder life than we do except for the robber birds and the heavy strong ones" (29).
Some of the younger fishermen behave much like the "robber birds," stealing irreverently from the sea, and thinking of the sea as a competitor rather than as a woman to love, as Santiago himself does. As Hemingway states, "Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys...
As a contestant or a place or even as an enemy" (29-30).
The birds, moreover, like the flying fish they are attracted to but usually fail to catch (29; 34) can be Santiago's friends when they show him where the fish are by diving and plunging for them (33-34), yet a source of frustration when the fish get away (34). Still, the birds on the ocean buoy Santiago's optimism, at least at the beginning, that his own "big fish" (35) is out there, somewhere:
He watched the flying fish burst out again and again and the ineffectual movements of the bird. That school has gotten away from me, he thought. They are moving out too fast and too far. But perhaps I will pick up a stray and perhaps my big fish is around them. My big fish must be somewhere. (34-35)
All in all, "The bird is a great help," the old man said (38).
Frustration turns to elation soon afterward when the "big fish" of the old fisherman's utmost hopes finally does bite: "He was happy feeling the gentle pulling and then... something unbelievably hard and heavy... "What a fish'"... (43). Psychologically, the fish is more than a fish, or becomes that way the more Santiago struggles with it. Just as the sea is a woman in Santiago's mind, the fish is a man, and his struggle with it becomes, psychologically at least, for him, a sort of man to man, "mano a mano" (hand-to-hand) struggle. As one critic suggests "The connection between the fish's behavior and
