Hemingway's Long Fish Story
Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1952, Fiction
The story starts off with a fisherman named Santiago from Cuba. People call him “salao” because he had not got a fish in 84 days. Then on the 85th day he got lucky and got a big marlin. It took two days and two nights for the fish to get tired, so on the third day Santiago shot him with a harpoon. while on the way back to Cuba sharks are attracted the the blood dripping out into the water and they attacked it. When he got to shore he noticed that the sharks ate at it until it was just a skeleton. Along with just the skeleton it was 18 feet from tail to nose. “It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal—a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.” Goodreads.com. I do agree with this quote very much, because he does seem “down on his luck” when he is out fishing. Then when Santiago does get a marlin it is a good size one and he becomes lucky again. The writing style to me is imagery, “During the night two porpoises came around the boat and he could hear them rolling and blowing,” Page 48. The effect it had on me was that I was able to imagine two animals in the water rolling and blowing when Santiago was trying to sleep on the way back to Cuba from the Gulf of Mexico. The Old Man and the Sea is almost the same as The Hunger Games along with being different. They are both the same when it comes to struggling to survive, because in Old Man and the Sea he has to kill things in order to survive. While in The Hunger Games they have to kill each other to survive and make it out alive. The ways they are different is that in The Hunger Games it is a TV show that is for entertainment and discipline, and in Old Man and the Sea it is a real life situation and no one is doing it for entertainment they are doing it for survival of him. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” To me this means he can have everything bad happen to him that destroys him but each and every time he will get back up and try again. I strongly agree with this quote because it can happen to anyone that is having everything go wrong yet they still decide to go on. The part of the book that I did not like is how he kept trying to catch fish and never got any, I also don't like fishing so that is part of the reason I don't like this book. I give The Old Man and the Sea 1 Paw -Don’t Leave the Den.
