2. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Oak Park, United States, on July 21, 1899. Taking a
turbulent life, Hemingway was married four times.
* Hemingway was a journalist before becoming a novelist; after leaving high school he went to
work for The Kansas city star, as a cub reporter.
* In the summer of 1933, Hemingway traveled
to Africa for a three-month safari.
*In 1940 Hemingway purchased a home outside
Havana, Cuba. He would live there for the next
twenty years, fishing and writing.
* He Won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
*On the morning of July 2, 1961, in
Ketchum, Idaho, took the hunting rifle and
shot himself.
3. PLOT
Santiago was a poor old fisherman, who after eighty-four days without catching a
fish, suffered jokes from colleagues. He had a faithful friend,Manolin – his disciple,
loyal to the old man- which was forbidden by his father to accompany him in
fisheries because of the bad luck of Santiago. Alone,Santiago decided to retrieve
the success and embarked to the high seas in his small boat with a little water,
only two baits given by the boy and feeding on fish, under the bliding sun. Lonely,
he had conversations with himself.
He feels a strong pull on his line, suggesting that is a great fish, a marlin. The
marlin hauls the skiff through the Gulf waters while Santiago lets out the line
when necessary, then holds fast to it, sometimes wrapping it around his shoulders.
Santiago’s left hand was cramping up, but he was determined to stay with the fish
until catch it. It lasted through an entire day and night.
When he finally catches the fish, he had to fight against several sharks attracted by
the blood trail of the marlin…another battle.
At the end of his journey, he arrives at the beach, exhausted, bruised and with
only the skeleton of the fish, but even so he received the admiration and respect
of people, colleagues and tourists who have seen the arrival of the old man.
4. CHARACTERS
CHARACTERS
*Santiago – “ The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in
the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin
cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on
his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his
hands had the deepcreased scars from handling heavy fish on the
cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as
erosions in a fishless desert.Everthing about him was old except his
eyes and they were the same colour as the sea and were cheerful
and undefeated.” He saw the world through the eyes of a boy.
* Manolin – a young boy who becomes the only
friend of the old man, but his parents forbade
him to fish with the old Santiago, because he
was out of luck.
*The sea
5. “ He always thought of the sea as la mar which is
what people call her in Spain when they love her.
Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her
but they are always said as though she were a
woman. Some of the younger fisherman, those who
used buoys as floats [...]spoke of her as el mar which
is masculine. They spoke of her as a contestant or a
place or even an enemy. But the old man always
thought of her as a feminine and as something that
gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or
wicked things it was because she could not help
them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he
thought.”
6. SETTING
* On land - a small fishermen village on the
northern coast of Cuba, below the Tropic of
Cancer and not far from the capital city of
Havana.
•At sea, - boat of Santiago, in north of Cuba in the
Gulf Stream.
• The time is September in the late 1940's.
Hemingway lived near Havana from 1940 until
1959.
7. CULTURAL IMPERIALISM
*Imperialism is the policy of expansion and territorial cultural and
economical domination of one nation over others.
The United States also influenced a lot in the island's politics, always
supporting the pro-American presidents. From an economic
standpoint, capitalism Cuba followed with great dependence on the
United States.
“American cultural imperialism has been one of the most pervasive forms
of this phenomenon, as we see American
Fashion, movies, music, sports, fast food etc.” – Loys Tyson – Critical Theory
Today
The devotion of Santiago to New York Yankees is an example of how
mass culture has been used by the United States to win hearts and minds
of Latin American in the postwar period.
The culture functions as an instrument of social control in the fight against
socialism.
75% of films watched by Cubans in 1948 were Hollywood productions. -
Jeremy Tunstall - The Media Were American
9. "All that is solid melts into air" is
concerned with modernization - changes in society, which saw the growth of
the modern capitalist world - as well as modernism in other aspects such as
literature, art and architecture.
Marshall Berman brings three concepts:
•Modernization - the social changes that constantly occur around us
• Modernity - the way in which these changes are immediately lived and
experienced
•Modernism – reflection of the intellectual and artistic, literary , material,
political representation of these changes.
•Straight/ Direct Writing
•Most frequent themes in modernist works are loneliness and isolation (even
in cities full of people).
