The Old Man and the Sea and the American dream

Khalani Shabana M.

Topic: The Old Man and the Sea and the American dream 

Paper 10

MKBU

The Old Man and the Sea, Heminagway's most recent novel(1952), is not so much a masterpiece in itself as virtuoso performance, a new demonstration of the novelist's gifts far more than a new development of them. The experience of literature is always comparative; Hemingway's sixth novel has almost the same theme as The undefeated, a story written twenty-five years before,and the old fisherman who has not made a catch for eighty-four days is in the same human situation as the aging matador of that story. Compared with that and other stories, and with the best episodes in Hemingway's previous novels' there is a certain thinness of characterization and situation.

Yet The Old Man and the Sea does give a new definition and meaning to Hemingway's work as a whole. It gives the reader an intensified awareness of how, for Hemingway, the kingdom of heaven, which is within us, is moral stamina alone, and experience, stripped of illusion, is inexhaustible threat. It is completely clear in this novel, as it is not when his characters are expatriates in Europe, that Hemingway's primary sense of existenxe is the essential condition of the pioneer. It is above all the terror and isolation of the pioneer in the forest that Hemingway seeks in his prize fighters, matadors, soldiers, and expatriate sportsmen. The old man's solitude is also meaningful; apart from the brief appearance of the young boy who is devoted to him, sorry for him, and has been told to avoid him, Santiago is the only human being in a narrative more than one hundred pages in length! The giant marlin is sympathetic character for whom the old man develops a centain fondness and the sharks who destroy all but the marlin's skeleton are villains whom he detests: the astonishing faxt remains that one human being is enough to make a genuine narrative. Moreover the old man is not only alone physically, but since he is old he will always be alone. cut off from youth, hope, friendship, love, and all athe other relationships which sustain human beings. Hence, as the old man struggles with the sea-with time, nature, and death-he possesses a singular purity of will and emotion. The completeness of his solitude does much to relate the novel to all of Hemingway's work, making one more aware of how some form of solitude isolated every other leading character, giving a new clarity to Jake barnes' mutilation, Frederick Henry's "separate peace," the soliude which the shell-shocked Nick adams seeks on a fishing trip in Big Two-Hearted River, and the monologue of the dying writer in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Thus, in a way, the old fisherman is the quintessential hero of Hemingway's fiction. Other human beings are simply absent now, and only the sharks are present to interfere with the naked confrontation of man and nature. It is the solitude which requires absolute courage and complete self-reliance.

With the old fisherman the pattern of Hemingway's fiction has come full circle. The hero as an old man stands in clear relation to the hero as a young boy and Nick adams as a child in indian camp, the first story of Hemingway's first book. Im that story Nick goes with his father, a doctor, to witness the mystery of birth: but he witnesses the horror of death also. The young Indian woman his father has come to help has been in labor for two days. "Daddy, can't you give her something to stop the screaming?" Nick asks his father. The doctor tells his son that despite her outcry the woman wants to be in labor and pain because she wants to have the baby and the baby too wants to be born. Then Dr.Adams performs a Caesarean using a jackknife. Dr.Adams feels exalted as he goes to tell the woman's husband the operation was successfull and finds him dead. His wife's sxreaming has made the Indean kill himself. This is hardly the initiation Dr.Adams had intended for his son. Yet, as father and son row home across the lakr, Nick's reassurance grows as his father replies to his questions about suffering and death. As the sun rises over the lake Nick feels"sure that he qould never die." This sentence illustrated the extreme illusion about existence which is native to the Hemingway hero and which makes disillusion, when it occurs, so astonishing and disastrous.

Just as the borth of a child causes the death of aman in Indian Camp,so in the last chapter of A Farewell to Arms, not only does the birth of a child cause the heroine's death, but before her death when she cries out in her agony, she speaks exactly like Nick Adams: "Can't they give me something?" and Frederick henry says to himself: "She can't die, "Just as Nick was sure that he would not die. When the heroine dies, the burden of the hero's experience of birth, love, and death is characterization of the nature of existence:

So now they got her in the end. You never got away with anything. . . You did not know what it was about. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you . . . They killed you in the end. . . You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.