The Old Man and the Sea
By Ernest Hemingway
Publication Year: 1952
Type: Fiction
Genre: classic, adventure
Read on 2018-05-24
View additional specs on this book in Muhan’s 2018 Reading Survey ➞
★★★★☆
If you can get past the first 80 out of 120 pages it does get good lol.
So most of this book is the old man tottering around his boat talking to himself and trying to catch this big ass fish by waiting around for it to tire itself out and die - but all while the old man himself is also dying as he uses his body (???) to cushion the line the fish is dragging him and the boat around with. I mean I know nothing about fishing but it’s a good metaphor so Hemingway go off I guess.
I didn’t really interpret this story as one about personal triumph or the American dream or whatever because the task was pretty much a misguided Sisyphean suicide mission from the get-go - one that the protagonist is pretty self-aware about even before the fish dies. I was getting more ambiguous man v. nature/environmentalism vibes from this. Like even as the old man continued to contemplate and feel bad about having to kill “his friend” the fish, all the other fish he caught and ate (including a dolphin 😢), and all those “great and noble” sharks, he was still..yknow...killing all of them, eating their flesh, planning on selling them at market and so on. So first of all I was getting bummed out about how all of this speaks to the way humanity knows it’s killing the planet and knows we’re not more worthy of life than any other organism and knows we can’t survive without the rest of our ecosystem but then just continues to destroy everything anyways. Second of all, by the time the old man had made up his mind to fuckin butcher this big ass fish, I was hoping and expecting for some sort of “the ocean takes back what is her’s” type of turnaround in the third act - which Hemingway definitely delivered, and then some.
Thank GOD I was never assigned to read this in school - reading the first two-thirds of this thing was such a fucking chore and I’m not even an hormonal teenager in mandatory English class with a teacher beating me over the head with metaphors, insisting that this thing is deserving of its Pulitzer. Like I blame no one for the rage this book provoked - Hemingway took his sweet time getting to the goddamn point and anyone who isn’t actively choosing to stick with him and the old man is definitely not gonna get anything out of this. I do feel like the efficacy of the third act is predicated on having experienced reading the first two, but again, that journey is pretty boring.
