Santiago is an aging fisherman who has gone 84 days without catching a fish, battling both his streak of bad luck and prejudice from the other fishermen. One day, he hooks an enormous marlin, battling it for three days before killing it, only to have it eaten by sharks by the time he returns to shore, exhausted. Though defeated, Santiago finds triumph in having fought nobly against impossible odds.

1. THE OLDMAN AND THE SEA
BY Earnest Hemingway

2. Group Members
• Maira Asif
• Ayesha Rasheed
• Hamna Imran Butt
• Hifza Masood Niazi

3. Our topic:
• Describe the full summary of the novel
“The Old man and the Sea” with its pros
and cons.

4. Key Facts
Full name The Old man and The Sea
Author Earnest Hemingway
Type of
work
Novella
Genre Parable, Tragedy
Language English
Time
written
1951
Place Cuba

5. Setting A small fishing village near Havana,
Cuba; the water of the Gulf of Mexico
Setting (Time) Late 1940’s
Protagonist Santiago
Themes The honor in struggle, pride in defeat
and death as a source of greatness and
determination
Major Conflict For 3 days, Santiago struggles against
the greatest fish of his long career
Climax With nothing left but a skeleton of the
marlin, Santiago returns home. His
exhausted body was now a symbol of
honorable defeat before the ocean.

6. Major Characters

7. Santiago
• Santiago is the old man referred in the title of
the novel. He has had an extended period of
bad luck. Yet he stays humble and hopeful. He
inhibits a pride in his abilities and his
unparalleled knowledge of the sea and his craft
preserves his sense of hope in his rainy days.

8. Manolin
• Manolin is a young boy who is Santiago’s
apprentice and friend. The old man first took him
out on a boat when he was merely five years old.
Although due to Santiago’s bad luck, Manolin had
been forced by his parents to work at another
boat, he would check up on Santiago regularly.
He cared deeply for him and made sure he ate
properly.

9. The Marlin
• He hooks the Marlin on the first day of his
fishing expedition. A struggle resembling tug-
of-war goes on between them until the old man
kills the Marlin on the 3rd day. The old man
reveres the Marlin as an ally and feels
destroyed at its destruction. The 18 foot long
Marlin was Santiago’s greatest catch despite it
being destroyed at the end by sharks.

10. SUMMARY

11. • Santiago is an old fisherman whose physical
existence is almost over but his eyes which are the
color of the sea remain cheerful and undefeated. It
has been eighty four days since he had caught
anything. His young apprentice Manolin has been
made to work another boat by his parents who
considered Santiago “salau” which was the worst
form of unlucky. Manolin, however, still brings him
bait and food. He regularly checks up on him. They
talk about the fish they had caught in luckier times or
about American baseball and the great Joe DiMaggio,
Baseball. In his rugged shack, Santiago sleeps with
newspaper covering his bare feet.

12. • He dreams his sweet, recurring dream, of lions
playing on the white beaches of Africa, a scene he
had seen from his ship when he was a very young
man. The next morning, before sunrise, the old man
goes to Manolin’s house to wake the boy. He and
Manolin part on the beach, wishing each other good
luck.. The old man rows steadily away from shore,
toward the deep waters of the Gulf Stream. He hears
the leaps and whirs of the flying fish, which he
considers to be his friends, and thinks with sympathy
of the small, frail birds that try to catch them. He
loves the sea, though at times it can be cruel. He
thinks of the sea as a woman whose wild behavior is
beyond her control.

13. • The old man drops his baited fishing lines to various
measured depths and rows expertly to keep them
from drifting with the current. Above all else, he is
precise. The sun comes up. Santiago continues to
move away from shore, observing his world as he
drifts along. He sees flying fish pursued by dolphins;
a diving, circling seabird; and Sargasso weed. Soon,
one of the old man’s lines goes taut. He pulls up a
ten-pound tuna, which, he says out loud, will make a
lovely piece of bait. He wonders when he developed
the habit of talking to himself but does not remember.
His line dips indicating a fish of considerable size.
The marlin plays with the bait for a while, and when
it does finally take the bait, it starts to move with it,
pulling the boat.

14. • The old man gives a mighty pull, then another, but he
gains nothing. The fish drags the skiff farther into the
sea. Over and over, the old man wishes he had the
boy with him. He thinks back to the time that he
caught one of a pair of marlin: the male fish let the
female take the bait, then he stayed by the boat, as
though in mourning. Santiago hopes that the fish will
jump, because its air sacs would fill and prevent the
fish from going too deep into the water, which would
make it easier to pull out. Santiago can do nothing but
hold on. He pledges his love and respect to the fish,
but he nevertheless promises that he will kill his
opponent before the day ends.

15. • The next day Santiago notices that his hand is
bleeding from where the line has cut it. Aware that he
will need to keep his strength, the old man makes
himself eat the tuna he caught the day before, which
he had expected to use as bait. His left hand cramps
up. Santiago is angered by the weakness of his body
and hopes the tuna will reinvigorate him. He feels a
brotherly desire to feed the marlin too. That morning
the fish jumps. Seeing it leap, he knows he has
hooked the biggest marlin he has ever seen. Just
before nightfall, a dolphin takes the second bait he
had dropped. The marlin wakes Santiago by jerking
the line. The fish jumps out of the water again and
again. His left hand, especially, is badly cut.

16. • As the sun rises, the marlin begins to circle. For hours
the old man fights the circling fish for every inch of
line, slowly pulling it in. Eventually, he pulls the fish
onto its side by the boat and plunges his harpoon into
it. The fish lurches out of the water, brilliantly and
beautifully alive as it dies. When it falls back into the
water, its blood stains the waves. Santiago’s hands are
so cut up that they resemble raw meat. He thinks
about how much money he will be able to make from
such a big fish. An hour later, Santiago sights the first
shark. It is a fierce Mako. It takes away almost forty
pound of the Marlin before Santiago lodges a harpoon
into it.

17. • It leaves the marlin mutilated and bloody. Santiago
knows the scent will spread. Two hours later, a pair of
shovel-nosed sharks arrives. The old man kills them
both, but not before they take a good quarter of the
marlin, including the best meat. Santiago wishes that
he hadn’t killed the marlin. He apologizes to the dead
marlin for having gone out so far, saying it did neither
of them any good. Another shovel-nosed shark
arrives. The old man kills it, but he loses his knife in
the process. Just before nightfall, two more sharks
approach. He manages to club the sharks into retreat.
Utterly exhausted, he hopes he does not have to fight
anymore.

18. • Santiago believes that he went against his luck when
he sailed too far out. Around midnight, a pack of
sharks arrives. The old man clubs the sharks with all
that’s left of his remaining might. Soon no meat is left
on the marlin. He numbly steers the boat to the
harbor, the skeleton of the fish still tied to the skiff.
He keeps blaming the destruction of the marlin on his
going out too far. Utterly exhausted, he lumbers to his
shack and goes to sleep. The next morning, Manolin
comes to the shack and is relieved to see his old
friend although the sight of his ragged condition
brings him to tears. At the harbor, Fishermen have
gathered around Santiago’s boat and measured the
carcass at eighteen feet.

19. • When the old man wakes, he and Manolin talk
warmly. Manolin tells him to rest, to make himself fit
for the days of fishing they will have together.
Unfeeling tourists go into a restaurant. They see the
remains of the marlin and wonder what they are,
having no idea of their meaning. Santiago sleeps
much of the day away, dreaming of lions.

20. Pros
• Ernest Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize winning novella
The Old man and the Sea perfectly encapsulates
many of the tropes of Hemingway’s singular prose.
• The strengths of the novella include the fact that the
allegorical tale is written in Hemingway’s trademark
sparse style and tells a simple story that emphasizes
the masculine values of the protagonist.

21. Cons
• Many of the same elements that make the novella so
compelling can be viewed as weaknesses too.
• The story is almost a parody of a Hemingway tale.
• A criticism that the novella faced was that it is a
curiously homosocial text that emphasizes the
relationships between men while entirely neglecting
to incorporate female characters
• Hemingway was often criticized of never writing
female characters with depth.

22. Conclusion
• This exceptional story acts as a therapeutic aid for
hopeless and depressed people who needed a
powerful force for continuing struggles of life against
fate. They should say as the boy Manolin, "I'll bring
the luck by myself." In the story the old man tells us
"It is silly not to hope...besides I believe it is a sin."
Hemingway draws a distinction between two
different types of success: outer-material and inner-
spiritual.

23. • While the old man lacks the former, the importance of
this lack is eclipsed by his possession of the later. He
teaches all people the triumph of indefatigable spirit
over exhaustible resources. Hemingway's hero as a
perfectionist man tells us: To be a man is to behave
with honor and dignity, not to succumb to suffering,
to accept one's duties without complaint, and most
importantly to have maximum self-control. At the end
of the story he mentions, "A man is not made for
defeat...a man can be destroyed but not defeated."
The book finishes with this symbolic sentence: "The
old man was dreaming about lions.“ Signifies that the
old man is still undefeated and hopeful of his future.

24. • FUN FACTS
• Hemingway wrote “The old man and the sea” to
prove to his adversaries and critics that he was not
through being a writer. It had been a decade since his
last good book. His struggle bears a similarity with
Santiago who is also trying to prove his worth to his
fellows.
• Hemingway claimed that there was no symbolism in
the novel. It was what it was. An old man struggle to
catch his greatest catch. In his own words,
• “I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea
and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them
good and true enough they would mean many
things.`”