Skip to main content

The Old Man And The Sea.

The Old Man And The Sea - Ernest Hemingway

 

Plot Overview-


The Old Man and the Sea is the story of an epic struggle between an old, seasoned fisherman and the greatest catch of his life. For eighty-four days,  Santiago, an aged Cuban fisherman, has set out to sea and returned empty-handed. So conspicuously unlucky is he that the parents of his young, devoted apprentice and friend, Manolin, have forced the boy to leave the old man in order to fish in a more prosperous boat. Nevertheless, the boy continues to care for the old man upon his return each night. He helps the old man tote his gear to his ramshackle hut, secures food for him, and discusses the latest developments in American baseball, especially the trials of the old man’s hero, Joe DiMaggio. Santiago is confident that his unproductive streak will soon come to an end, and he resolves to sail out farther than usual the following day.

On the eighty-fifth day of his unlucky streak, Santiago does as promised, sailing his skiff far beyond the island’s shallow coastal waters and venturing into the Gulf Stream. He prepares his lines and drops them. At noon, a big fish, which he knows is a marlin, takes the bait that Santiago has placed one hundred fathoms deep in the waters. The old man expertly hooks the fish, but he cannot pull it in. Instead, the fish begins to pull the boat.
Unable to tie the line fast to the boat for fear the fish would snap a taut line, the old man bears the strain of the line with his shoulders, back, and hands, ready to give slack should the marlin make a run. The fish pulls the boat all through the day, through the night, through another day, and through another night. It swims steadily northwest until at last it tires and swims east with the current. The entire time, Santiago endures constant pain from the fishing line. Whenever the fish lunges, leaps, or makes a dash for freedom, the cord cuts Santiago badly. Although wounded and weary, the old man feels a deep empathy and admiration for the marlin, his brother in suffering, strength, and resolve.
On the third day the fish tires, and Santiago, sleep-deprived, aching, and nearly delirious, manages to pull the marlin in close enough to kill it with a harpoon thrust. Dead beside the skiff, the marlin is the largest Santiago has ever seen. He lashes it to his boat, raises the small mast, and sets sail for home. While Santiago is excited by the price that the marlin will bring at market, he is more concerned that the people who will eat the fish are unworthy of its greatness.
As Santiago sails on with the fish, the marlin’s blood leaves a trail in the water and attracts sharks. The first to attack is a great mako shark, which Santiago manages to slay with the harpoon. In the struggle, the old man loses the harpoon and lengths of valuable rope, which leaves him vulnerable to other shark attacks. The old man fights off the successive vicious predators as best he can, stabbing at them with a crude spear he makes by lashing a knife to an oar, and even clubbing them with the boat’s tiller. Although he kills several sharks, more and more appear, and by the time night falls, Santiago’s continued fight against the scavengers is useless. They devour the marlin’s precious meat, leaving only skeleton, head, and tail. Santiago chastises himself for going “out too far,” and for sacrificing his great and worthy opponent. He arrives home before daybreak, stumbles back to his shack, and sleeps very deeply.
The next morning, a crowd of amazed fishermen gathers around the skeletal carcass of the fish, which is still lashed to the boat. Knowing nothing of the old man’s struggle, tourists at a nearby café observe the remains of the giant marlin and mistake it for a shark. Manolin, who has been worried sick over the old man’s absence, is moved to tears when he finds Santiago safe in his bed. The boy fetches the old man some coffee and the daily papers with the baseball scores, and watches him sleep. When the old man wakes, the two agree to fish as partners once more. The old man returns to sleep and dreams his usual dream of lions at play on the beaches of Africa.
Reference-


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Old Stone Mansion.

Old Stone Mansion – Mahesh Elkunchwar. Plot Overview- The play, Wada Chirebandi, begins on the fifth day after the demise of Tatyaji (Venkatesh) the patriarch of the Deshpande family of Dharangaon. Dharangaon is a small hamlet in the interiors of   Maharashtra where the influences of commercial Bombay has slowly spread its tentacles. The play begins with Aai, the widow of Tatyaji, awaiting the arrival of her second son Sudhir and his wife Anjali from Bombay, to attend the 13th day rites. In the meantime, the eldest son Bhaskar and his wife, Vahini, has taken over the reins of the family by taking charge of the two objects of command, the keys and the ancestral jewellery box. Been a traditional Brahmin family, Bhaskar intends to conduct the rituals in full traditional fanfare even when the family has fallen in difficult lines.   Bhaskar expects Sudhir to bear the expenses, as his image of someone from a big city is that of been financially well off, whil...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mystic Drum.

The Mystic Drum - Gabriel Okara. About Poet. Gabriel Okara is a Nigerian poet and novelist   Okara’s   Poetry  is based on a series of contrasts in which symbols are neatly balanced against each other. The need to  reconcile   the extremes of experience (life and death are common themes) preoccupies his verse, and a typical poem has a circular movement from everyday reality to a moment of joy and back to reality again. Summary. The drum in African poetry, generally stands for the spiritual pulse of traditional African life. The poet asserts that first, as the drum beat inside him, fishes danced in the rivers and men and women danced on the land to the rhythm of the drum. But standing behind the tree, there stood an outsider who smiled with an air of indifference at the richness of their culture. However, the drum still continued to beat rippling the air with quickened tempo compelling the dead to dance and sing with their shadows. The ancestral gl...
Post a Comment
Read more

Minority

Minority- Imtiaz Dharker I was born a foreigner. I carried on from there to become a foreigner everywhere I went, even in the place planted with my relatives, six-foot tubers sprouting roots, their fingers and faces pushing up new shoots of maize and sugar cane. All kinds of places and groups of people who have an admirable history would, almost certainly, distance themselves from me. I don’t fit, like a clumsily translated poem; like food cooked in milk of coconut where you expected   Ghee or cream, the unexpected aftertaste of cardamom or neem   . There’s always a point that where the language flips into an unfamiliar taste; where words tumble over a cunning tripwire on the tongue; were the frame slips, the reception of an image not quite tuned, ghost-outlined, that signals, in their midst, an alien. And so I scratch, scratch through the night, at this growing scab on black and white. E...
Post a Comment
Read more