How did Ernest Hemingway's life experiences influence The Old Man and the Sea.?

Question

HELP!

Answer 1

In two ways, basically:
1. Hemingway was a great "sportsman", including deep sea fishing. So he knew a lot about catching the big ones.

2. But, more importantly, on a symbolic level, Hemingway WAS the "Old Man", the "big fish" was his work (novels, short stories) and the sharks that destoryed his "catch" were the critics who savaged his writing.

Here's a great review:

"The apparent clarity of The Old Man and the Sea is deceptive, like certain biblical parables or Arthurian legends that, beneath their simplicity, contain complex religious and ethical allegories, historical references and psychological subtleties. As well as being a beautiful and moving fiction, this tale is also a representation of the human condition, according to Hemingway's vision. And, to some extent, it was also a resurrection for its author.
It was written after one of the biggest failures of his literary career, Across the River and into the Trees, a novel full of stereotypes and rhetorical flourishes which seems to be written by a mediocre imitator of The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta), and which the critics, above all in the United States, reviewed with ferocity - some of them, as respectable as Edmund Wilson, seeing in that novel the signs of the writer's irremediable decline. This cruel premonition was close to the mark, because the truth is that Hemingway had entered a period of waning creativity and output, ever more crippled by illness and alcohol, and with little energy for life. The Old Man and the Sea was the swan song of a great writer in decline and, thanks to this proud tale, he became again a great writer by producing what in the course of time - Faulkner saw this - would become, despite its brevity, the most enduring of all his books. Many of the works he wrote, which in their time seemed as if they would have a lasting effect, such as For Whom the Bell Tolls and even the brilliant The Sun Also Rises, have lost their freshness and vigour and now seem dated, out of touch with current sensibilities that reject their elemental macho philosophy and their often superficial picturesque nature. But, like a number of his stories, The Old Man and the Sea has survived the ravages of time without a wrinkle, and preserves intact its artistic seduction and its powerful symbolism as a modern myth.

It is impossible not to read the odyssey of the lone Santiago, battling against the gigantic fish and the merciless sharks along the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba, as a projection of the fight that Hemingway himself had begun to wage against the enemies that had already taken up residence within him. These enemies would first attack his mind and later his body, and would cause him, in 1961, impotent and having lost his memory and spirit, to blow his brains out with one of the guns that he so loved, and which had taken the lives of so many animals.

But what gives the adventure of the Cuban fisherman in those tropical waters its extraordinary breadth is that, by osmosis, the reader recognises in the struggle of old Santiago against the silent enemies that will end up defeating him a description of something more constant and universal: that life is a permanent challenge, and that by facing up to this challenge with the bravery and dignity of the fisherman in the story, men and women can achieve a moral greatness, a justification for their existence, even though they might be defeated. This is the reason why when Santiago returns, exhausted and with bloody hands, to the little fishing village where he lives (Cojímar, although that name is not mentioned in the text) carrying the useless skeleton of the big fish eaten by the sharks, he seems to us to be someone who, through his recent experience, has gained enormously in moral stature, surpassing himself and transcending the physical and mental limitations of ordinary mortals.

His story is sad, but not pessimistic. Quite the contrary, he shows that there is always hope, that, even with the worst tribulations and setbacks, a man's behaviour can change defeat into victory and give meaning to his life. The day after his return, Santiago is more worthy of respect than he had been before setting sail, and that is what makes the child Manolín cry: his admiration for the resolute old man, even more than the affection and devotion that he feels for the man who taught him how to fish. This is the meaning of the famous phrase that Santiago utters to himself in the middle of the ocean and which has become the watchword of Hemingway's view of life: "A man can be destroyed but never defeated." Not all men, of course; only those - the heroes of his fictions: bull fighters, hunters, smugglers, adventurers of every hue - who, like the fisherman, are endowed with the emblematic virtue of the Hemingway hero: courage.

Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea belongs to this noble lineage of brave men. He is a very humble man, very poor - he lives in a wretched shack and uses newspapers for bedding - and the butt of the village's jokes. And he is also alone: he lost his wife many years earlier, and his only company since then has been his memories of the lions that he saw walking along the beaches in Africa at night from the deck of the tramp steamer where he worked, some American baseball players like Joe DiMaggio, and Manolín, the boy who used to go fishing with him and who now, due to family pressure, has to help another fisherman. For him, fishing is not as it was for Hemingway and many of his characters, a sport, a pastime, a way to win prizes or of proving themselves by facing up to the challenges of the deep, but a vital necessity, a job which - through great hardship and effort - keeps him from dying of hunger. This context makes Santiago's struggle with the giant marlin extraordinarily human, as does the modesty and naturalness with which the old fisherman carries out his heroic deed: without boasting, without feeling a hero, like a man who is simply carrying out his duty.

For the context of the story, Hemingway used his experience: his passion for fishing and his long acquaintance with the village and fishermen of Cojímar: the factory, the Perico bar, La Terraza, where the neighbours drink and talk. The text is permeated with Hemingway's affection for, and identification with, the marine landscape and the men and women of the sea on the island of Cuba. The Old Man and the Sea pays them a great homage.

There is a turning point in the novel, a real qualitative leap, which turns Santiago's adventure, first with the fish and later with the sharks, into a symbol of the Darwinian struggle for survival, of the human condition, forced to kill in order to survive, and of the unexpected reserves of valour and resistance that human beings possess, which can be summoned when their honour is at stake. This chivalric concept of honour - respect for oneself, blind observance of a self-imposed moral code - is what finally makes the fisherman Santiago commit himself, as he does in his fight with the fish, to a struggle that, at an indefinable moment, is no longer just one more episode in his daily struggle to earn a living, and becomes instead an ordeal, a test in which the dignity and pride of the old man are being measured. And he is very conscious of this ethical and metaphysical dimension to the struggle - during his long soliloquy he exclaims: "But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures." At this point, the story is no longer just recounting the adventure of a fisherman with a biblical name, it is recounting the whole adventure of humankind, summed up in that odyssey without witnesses or prizes, where cruelty and valour, need and injustice, force and inventiveness are intertwined, along with the mysterious design that maps out the fate of each individual.

For this remarkable transformation in the story to occur - the shift from the particular to a universal archetype - there has been a gradual build-up of emotions and sensations, of hints and allusions that gradually extend the horizons of the tale to a point of complete universality. It manages this shift through the skill with which the story is written and constructed. The omniscient narrator narrates from very close to the protagonist but often lets him take over the account, disappearing behind the thoughts, exclamations and monologues through which Santiago distracts himself from monotony or anguish as he waits for the invisible fish that is dragging his boat along to get tired and come up to the surface so that he can kill it. The narrator is always completely persuasive, both when he describes objectively what is happening from a point removed, or when he allows Santiago to relieve him of this task. He achieves this persuasive power through the coherence and simplicity of his language that seems - only seems, of course - to be that of a man as simple and intellectually limited as the old fisherman, and through displaying a prodigious knowledge of all the secrets of navigation and fishing in the waters of the Gulf, something that fits the personality of Santiago like a glove. This knowledge explains the prodigious skill that Santiago displays in his struggle with the fish that, in this story, represents brute force that is defeated by the seafaring ingenuity and art of the old man.

These technical details help to reinforce the realist effect of a story which is in fact more symbolic or mythical than realist, as do the few but effective images that are used to map concisely the life and character of Santiago: those lions, those games of baseball and the extraordinary legend of DiMaggio (who, like him, was the son of a fisherman). Apart from being very believable, all of this shows the narrowness and primitiveness of the fisherman's life, which makes his achievement all the more remarkable and praiseworthy. For the person who, in The Old Man and the Sea, represents man at his best, in one of those exceptional circumstances in which, through his will and moral conscience, he manages to rise above his condition and rub shoulders with the mythological heroes and gods, is a wretched, barely literate old man.

In a highly favourable review soon after the book was published, Faulkner stated that, in this novel, Hemingway had "discovered God". That is possible but, of course, unverifiable. But he also stated that the main theme of the story was "compassion", and here he hit the mark. In this moving story, sentimentality is conspicuous by its absence; everything takes place with Spartan sobriety on Santiago's small boat and in the ocean depths. And yet, from the first to the last line of the tale, a warmth and delicacy permeates everything that happens, reaching a climax in the final moments when, on the point of collapse through grief and exhaustion, old Santiago, stumbling and falling, drags the mast of his boat towards his shack through the sleeping village. What the reader feels in this moment is difficult to describe, as is always the case with the mysterious messages that great works convey. Perhaps, "mercy", "compassion", "humanity", are the words that come closest to this feeling."

Answer 2

1

Answer 3

I've read a lot of Hemingway. Too much macho for me. Would you like to go out on the town with this guy? Maybe once or twice, but that would get old fast. He was a good story teller, but not someone I would encourage my daughters to emulate. He was a story teller. Cuba is a place that should allow more freedom; not promote a myth of the Americas. I live in Michigan and fish the same waters he fished. He is not Paul Bunyan, or maybe he is?

Answer 4

Totally.
I went to CUba once and you hear
that all personal experience EH had with the cuban sailor
are in the novel.