Stoicism in a Cruel World: Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”

An allegory? A Moby Dick imitation? A morality tale? A (semi-)autobiographical account? How should Ernest Hemingway’s signature work The Old Man and the Sea (1952) be read? One fact is carved in stone. The work has a gargantuan reputation, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and reminding the Nobel Prize committee that acknowledgement of Hemingway’s genius had been long overdue. Readers come to the novella with certain expectations, and usually leave slightly puzzled, unsure of its “message” and yet utterly convinced of the power of its composition. The novella showcases Hemingway’s laconic prose style at its most sophisticated. It contains only bare bones, devoid of longwinded character and setting descriptions. The reader is given little, and must therefore work twice as hard to steer through Hemingway’s “cruel sea.”

Ostensibly, the novella is about an aged, down-and-out fisherman who has to fish alone and finds himself entangled in a body and mind battle with a giant marlin. After much labour, the marlin is defeated; but the old man’s struggle continues when sharks begin to attack the dead marlin. The novella, rather inevitably, ends with the old man’s triumph over Nature.

The Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway’s manifesto for stoicism. From the onset the writer makes it clear that the ocean is a cruel place (he ironically has the old fisherman think of it as a woman). In order to survive out there, one must kill other creatures to keep strong (59). The old man’s aloneness is emphasised throughout. His struggle is entirely his own. Even though he knows he has a companion in a young boy, who has chosen to fish with another boat, he knows he is up against the sea alone. When he has hooked the marlin and attempts to harpoon it, he views the act as a metaphysical sharing of pain:

He took all his pain and what was left of his strength and his long gone pride and he put it against the fish’s agony and the fish came over onto his side and swam gently on his side, his bill almost touching the planking of the skiff and started to pass the boat, long, deep, wide, silver and barred with purple and interminable in the water. (93)

Hemingway’s language delicately balances the harsh and the gentle. The old man, having lost his youth and vigour long ago, has little to lose, and the only way for him to reclaim his pride as a man is to kill the fish. The fish in turn responds in a gentle manner to the old man’s act. The sharing of pain momentarily creates a bond between man and fish, neutralising the prospects of loneliness and death.

The old man’s triumph over the marlin is only temporary, for he is soon under siege from opportunistic sharks. “When the fish had been hit it was as though he himself were hit,” writes Hemingway. The old man’s glory is short-lived. He wishes “it had been a dream now and that [he] had never hooked the fish and was alone in bed on the newspapers” (103). Almost immediately after, the old man reminds himself that “man is not made for defeat.” “A man can be destroyed but not defeated,” he adds (103).

The act of killing, however, is not without the shadow of guilt. Even though the old man has killed out of pride, he tells himself he has done so in self-defence. His reasoning: “Everything kills everything else in some way. Fishing kills me exactly as it keeps me alive” (106). This paradox is fascinating in that it posits life is full of contradictions. Morality, something which is clear-cut and unbending, can have no place in a paradoxical world.

When the novella draws to a close after only 127 pages, the reader is left with the impression that stoicism is the only adequate weapon against a world that is openly hostile and potentially life-threatening. The individual must weather loneliness, make dubious moral choices, and battle Death the Arch-nemesis; he must do all these things with his head held high and his chest puffed up, regardless of the pain inflicted on his body.

Despite the violence and the bloodshed, the novella ends on a serene note, with the old man falling into a deep sleep in his home and dreaming of lions. One cannot help but hear Hemingway’s voice here. Perhaps the man himself, now approaching old age, wished for peace and quiet after having lived through several stormy decades. It is the more tragic that less than a decade after the publication of the novella, Hemingway ended his own life, weary of waiting for the peace that he knew would never come.