Santiago
An old fisherman in a Cuban village who has caught nothing for eighty-four days. On the eighty-fifth he rows out past every other boat and hooks a marlin bigger than the boat he is sitting in.
To catch a great fish and be worthy of it. He tells the boy he may not be as strong as he thinks he is, but that he knows many tricks and has resolution, and at sea he keeps asking himself whether he is behaving as the baseball player Joe DiMaggio would.
The book
At a glance
- Santiago — an old fisherman working alone out of a village on the Cuban coast
- "The old man" nearly everywhere; the boy calls him Santiago; the Casablanca dockers called him The Champion
- Eighty-four days without a fish, which the book calls salao — the worst form of unlucky
- A one-room shack: a bed, a table, a chair, a place to cook, and newspapers over the bed springs
- Dead. Her tinted photograph is on a shelf under his clean shirt, taken off the wall because it made him lonely
- The New York Yankees, in day-old newspapers passed to him by Perico at the bodega
- Lions on an African beach, seen from a square-rigged ship when he was a boy. He no longer dreams of storms, or women, or great fish, or his wife
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeSantiago is the old man of the title in Ernest Hemingway's 1952 novel: a fisherman working alone out of a village on the Cuban coast, near enough to Havana that the day's catch goes there by ice truck. He lives in a one-room shack with a bed, a table, one chair and a place to cook. He sleeps on newspapers spread over the bed springs and rolls his trousers up to make a pillow. His wife is dead, and her tinted photograph is on a shelf under his clean shirt, taken down off the wall because looking at it made him lonely.
When the book opens he has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. The village has a word for that and the book translates it: salao, the worst form of unlucky. The younger fishermen at the harbour café make jokes about him and the older ones look at him and are sad. His answer is to go further out than any of them, before first light on the eighty-fifth day, and fish the deep water alone.
Almost everything the reader learns about him he says out loud — to himself, to the fish, to the birds, to his own cramped left hand — because for most of the novel there is nobody else in the boat. He talks about American baseball, about an arm-wrestling match he won on the docks at Casablanca when he was young, and about the boy who used to fish with him and is not there.
How the book draws them
- The one thing about him that is not oldThe book introduces him thin and gaunt, with deep creases in his neck, brown blotches on his cheeks from the sun's reflection off the tropical sea, and old scars on his hands from handling heavy fish on the lines. None of the scars are fresh. Then it makes a single exception: "Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated."
- The supper that is not thereEvery evening the boy asks to borrow the cast net, and Santiago tells him to take it and offers him a pot of yellow rice with fish. There is no cast net — they sold it — and there is no rice. "But they went through this fiction every day." The book says outright that both of them know, and neither of them mentions it.
- He was the champion of the Casablanca docksNeeding his confidence back on the second day, he remembers a hand game — arm wrestling — in a tavern at Casablanca, across the water from Havana, against the strongest man on the docks. It went one day and one night with their elbows on a chalk line, the referees swapped every four hours so they could sleep, and blood came out from under the fingernails of both men. He forced the other man's hand down on the Monday morning. For a long time afterwards everyone called him The Champion.
- He prays, and says he does not believeHours into the fight with the fish he promises ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys, and a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin of Cobre in eastern Cuba, if he catches it. He prefaces the vow with "I am not religious," says the prayers mechanically and fast when he is too tired to remember them, and observes that Hail Marys are easier to say than Our Fathers. Then he adds a request of his own, asking the Virgin to pray for the death of the fish, wonderful though he is.
- He calls the fish his brother and intends to kill him anywayWith the marlin on the line and out of sight below the boat, he talks to it directly: "Fish," he said, "I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends." Later, chewing raw fish to keep his strength up, he thinks he would like to feed the fish, because the fish is his brother, and that he must kill him and stay strong enough to do it.
- Alone, and clear about itOn the first night out he thinks: "No one should be alone in their old age, he thought. But it is unavoidable." The next thing he thinks is an instruction to eat the tuna in the morning before it spoils, so that he stays strong. When he has company again at the end he notices, in the same flat way, how pleasant it is to have someone to talk to instead of speaking only to himself and to the sea.
- The most quoted line in the book, where it actually happensA shark has taken about forty pounds of his fish, and his harpoon with it. He says it aloud in the boat, to nobody: "But man is not made for defeat," he said. "A man can be destroyed but not defeated." In the next breath he says he is sorry he killed the fish, that the bad time is coming, and that he does not even have the harpoon now.
He hooks the marlin far out in the Gulf Stream on the eighty-fifth day, and it is longer than his skiff. It tows him for two days and two nights while he holds the line across his back and eats raw fish to keep going. He reaches the harbour in the dark, carries the mast up the road to his shack, sitting down five times on the way, and sleeps face down with his arms out straight and the palms of his hands up.
What he says about it afterwards is short. Sailing in, he asks himself what beat him and answers his own question: "Nothing," he said aloud. "I went out too far." In the morning, to the boy: "They beat me, Manolin," he said. "They truly beat me." He also mentions, once and without emphasis, that in the night he spat something strange and felt something in his chest was broken. The last thing the book says about him is that he is asleep again and dreaming about the lions.