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The Old Man and the Sea is the story of an epic struggle between an old, seasoned fisherman and the greatest catch of his life. For eighty-four days, Santiago, an aged Cuban fisherman, has set out to sea and returned empty-handed.
- Day Five
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- Key Facts
Full title The Old Man and the Sea. Author Ernest Hemingway....
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- Day One
A summary of Day One in Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and...
- Character List
The old man first took him out on a boat when he was merely...
- Day Four
A summary of Day Four in Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and...
- Day Three
A summary of Day Three in Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and...
- Day Five
Explore the full plot summary, an in-depth character analysis of Santiago, and explanations of important quotes from The Old Man and the Sea.
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What is the story Old Man and the Sea about?
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The novella’s protagonist, Santiago, faces the most strenuous days of a long life spent coaxing a living from the sea. These days on the sea test his stamina and prove that he can “suffer like a man” against pain, exhaustion, failure, and age.
Themes. Next. Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. The Honor in Struggle, Defeat & Death. From the very first paragraph, Santiago is characterized as someone struggling against defeat. He has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish—he will soon pass his own record of eighty-seven days.
The beginning of the novella The Old Man and the Sea resembles beginning of a fairy tale: “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf stream...” (App. 1;1)The exposition does determine neither exact place nor time and creates an 24 impression of abstract narration in a sense “once upon a time, there was a man”.
In The Old Man and the Sea, Spencer Tracy talks to the whale. In Harvey, James Steward chats it up with a tall imaginary rabbit! It takes Robert Redford to show us how to face isolation with dignity and silence (save one well-deserved F-word).
