In the following essay, Beegel draws upon Catholic iconography, the work of environmentalist Rachel Carson and others, and the writings of Herman Melville to consider the ways in which the sea takes on a complex, gendered persona in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.

In the following essay, Sylvester provides details about the Cuban cultural context of The Old Man and the Sea, as he argues that the novella is directed at readers who either know or want to know about the locale Hemingway describes, and asserts that historical specificity informs many of the novella's symbols.

In the following revision of an essay that first appeared in his influential 1956 work Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, Baker argues that Hemingway's particular understanding of the notion of "Wahrheit," or "Truth, "finds its greatest expression in The Old Man and the Sea; that Santiago is a Christ-like hero in touch with his true nature; and that the boy Manolin stands for the old man's lost youth. He goes on to comment on the movement of struggle, deprivation, an...

In the following essay, Wittkowski contends that Santiago's struggle and suffering are patterned after that of the bullfighter and Christ on the Cross, and further that the ideal of the fighter-athlete in the novella encompasses and takes the place of the ideal of Christ.

In the following excerpt, Love draws upon the diverse fields of evolutionary biology, ecology, psychology, and literary theory to explore the importance of humanity's relationship to the natural world in Hemingway's short novel, The Old Man and the Sea.

In the following essay, Baskett provides a detailed analysis of the symbolic detail in The Old Man and the Sea—from biblical allusions to Santiago's aura of "strangeness" — which he says contributes to Hemingway's "fifth dimensional prose," or writing that "communicates the immediate experience of the perpetual now."

In the following essay, Morgan and Losada trace parallels between Hemingway's fisherman Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea and the heroes of the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey.

In the following essay, Hamilton examines the central, unifying symbols in The Old Man and the Sea—in particular the image of the fish, a Christian symbol — and argues that at the heart of the novella is the Christian paradox of man's search for God and God's simultaneous search for man.

In the following essay, Taylor rejects previous assessments of the novella as a parable of sin and punishment, asserting instead that the old man's struggle can be seen in terms used by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche — as an affirmation of life in the highest manner, as a recognition that to do what "must be done," a human being should "go far out," as Santiago has.

In the following essay, Hovey rejects earlier interpretations of Santiago as a Christ-figure and Aristotelian tragic hero, seeing him rather as a more believable character than those found in Hemingway's other works; he is representative of the human race and the novella "reconciles us to our human condition."

In the following essay, Stephens argues that The Old Man and the Sea is the most perfect expression and "crest of the iceberg" in Hemingway's tragic vision — which pervades all of his work — of man as animal attempting to transcend his animal nature.

In the following essay, Hofling offers a psychoanalytic reading of The Old Man and the Sea, contending that for the adult male reader of the story, Santiago serves both as a father figure and someone who, because of his "victory-in-defeat" or lack of adult success, brings to mind a regressive "latency" experience of adolescence.

In the following essay, Burhans asserts that in his novella Hemingway uses "perfectly realized symbolism and irony" to affirm the values of courage, love, humility, solidarity, and interdependence.

In the following two-part essay, the first part of which appeared in 1952 and the second of which is a 1966 commentary on the earlier reaction, Young first praises The Old Man and the Sea's perfect construction, exciting story, and tight action, and regards the tale as one about life: that struggle against natural forces that cannot be overcome but which can be met with dignity. In the second part of the essay, Young recants some of his earlier praise of the work, pointing out its "affectatio...

In the following essay, Grebstein analyzes Hemingway's craft in The Old Man and the Sea, commenting on the structure, symbolic patterns, language, and narrative technique in the novella.

In the following chapter from a full-length book about Hemingway's notion of heroism, which is a revised version of an article that originally appeared in College English in 1955, Gurko examines The Old Man and the Sea in the context of Hemingway's other work, seeing it as a movement away from society and its artifices to the challenges of nature and the possibility for liberation of the human spirit.

In the following essay, Cooperman considers The Old Man and the Sea a "poem of reconciliation to the meaning and nature of age," maintaining that Hemingway fails to view old age in any other terms but through the values of pride, sacrifice, and endurance, and as a hardening rather than a softening of the qualities found in youth.

In the following excerpt, Stoltzfus presents a semiotic reading, based on the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, of the central words in The Old Man and the Sea, which, he contends, provide insight into Hemingway's conscious narrative as well as both Santiago's and Hemingway's unconscious desires.

In the following essay, Weeks enumerates the errors in descriptive detail in The Old Man and the Sea, pointing out that the realism characteristic of Hemingway's "better work" is absent in the novella and taking this as an indication that Hemingway's "view of the world has gone soft"

In the following essay, Barbour and Sattelmeyer argue that baseball and baseball talk in The Old Man and the Sea serve as the boy Manolin's initiation into adulthood and establish a course of heroic action in the novella, as the struggles of baseball player Joe DiMaggio and Santiago are shown to be emblematic of humanity.

The themes that Hemingway weaves into The Old Man and the Sea, like counterpoint in a Bach fugue, explore the ideas of pride in killing and victory in conquest as opposed to humility in defeat and suffering in abnegation. Santiago is a pagan Catholic whose age, pride, honor, and courage force him to prove that pain is nothing to a man and that a fisherman can perform miracles. This Cuban protagonist of Spanish birth harpoons marlin like a matador and suffers pain like a Christ figure. Using Santiago as a sy...

Carlos Baker writes of what he calls Colonel Cantwell's "informed illusion" in Across the River and Into the Trees: the Colonel "well knows that the necessary thing to retain, after the loss of any illusion, is the capacity for belief which made the original illusion possible."1 Mr. Baker then notices that in The Old Man and the Sea Santiago "loses the physical battle he has won," but wins the "moral victory of having lasted without permane...

In the following essay, Wilson asserts that the time spans mentioned in The Old Man and the Sea refer to the sacred Christian mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption, which reinforce the mythic dimension of the story.

In the following essay, Flora argues that The Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway's "parable of practical Christianity," as Santiago finds his greatest reward in being humble, enduring, launching into the deep, and having faith, hope, and love.

In the following early review, originally published in The New Republic in 1952, Schorer points out some flaws in The Old Man and the Sea, then goes on to call Hemingway "the greatest craftsman in the American novel in this century" and asserts that the excitement of the novella comes from its parable-like quality, as it tells of the struggle of the artist as he strives to master his subject.

The publishers called ["The Old Man and the Sea"] a classic … with a hastiness of epithet that suggests the speed of modern times; in more backward ages it took three or four centuries to make a classic. There is one sense, however, in which the publishers' claim is justified. "The Old Man and the Sea" is classical in spirit if we think of "classical" as a term applied to those works in all fields that accept limitations of space, subject and treatment...