1. • Presenter: Drashti V. Dave
• Topic of presentation: Santiago: a mirror or
contrast image of Hemingway’s biography.
• Submitted to: Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of
English
• Maharaja Krisnkumarsinhji Bhavnagar
University
• Paper no: 10 – The American Literature
• Roll no: 06 Year: 2014
• Sem: 3 M.A. part-2

2. About the novel:
• Simple but deeply meaningful
story, old man’s struggle for
survival.
• Santiago who have all good
and bad experiences of life, he
fight against nature.
• The novel suggests that it is
possible to transcend this
natural law.
• Death is the unavoidable force
in the novella, kind of open
ended.

3. About the Hemingway:
• Ernest Miller Hemingway was an
American author and journalist. His
economical and understated style had a
strong influence on 20th-century fiction,
while his life of adventure and his public
image influenced later generations.
Hemingway produced most of his work
between the mid-1920s and the mid-
1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1954. He published seven
novels, six short story collections and two
non-fiction works. After the publication of
The Old Man and the Sea in 1952,
Hemingway went on safari to Africa,
where he was almost killed in two plane
crashes that left him in pain or ill-health
for much of the rest of his life. Hemingway
had permanent residences in Key West,
Florida, and Cuba during the 1930s and
1940s, but in 1959 he moved from Cuba
to Ketchum, Idaho, where he committed
suicide in the summer of 1961.

4. Santiago: represent both contrast & mirror
image of Hemingway:
• Santiago an old man who is
protagonist, was once a great
fisherman, but now he is regarded
as a has-been, because he has gone
“84 days…without catching a fish”
• Santiago serves as a metaphor for
the creative artist, someone like
Hemingway himself.
• Hemingway’s loneliness is apparent in
Santiago’s characterization and
external conflict.
• Hemingway was an expert at deep-sea
fishing and had won several
prizes in various competitions.
• The background in The Old Man and
the Sea is derived from real- life
Cuban fishing villages near the Gulf
Stream. The subject of the luckless
Old Man who caught a giant fish also
came from personal experience.

5. • It was to be Hemingway’s final novel. Many critics see in it a
comparison between Santiago, an old man fighting to master the
fish and maintain his reputation, and Hemingway, an old man
fighting to retain an active lifestyle. Even if the novel is not partially
autobiographical, the novel proves Hemingway’s abilities as a
novelist, for the book expertly blends facts and fiction to produce
one of the most poignant tales ever written.

6. Some points about mirror & contrast image
• Santiago: for him “everyday is
new day”
• “Hope” is chief thing
• Hemingway’s description
towards nature: life giver &
life taker.
• Old man’s struggle is
repetitive same in
Hemingway life. (similarity)
• “Struggle is ultimately futile”
(contrast)
• Pride & Ambition vs. Fate &
Chance.

7. • Hemingway’s hatred of women is also apparent
in this story.
• Because of Hemingway’s negative experiences
with women, most of the references to females
in The Old Man and the Sea are negative.
• Hemingway exalts males further deprecates
females.
• He believed that women lack self-control, and
they are deceptive.

8. End of the novel symbolically represent end of
life:
• Santiago represents a noble and tragic individualism revealing
what man can do in an indifferent universe which defeats him, and
the love he can feel for such a universe and his humility before it
Hemingway has been increasingly concerned with the relationship
between individualism and interdependence.
• The Old Man and the Sea is a manifestation of Hemingway’s life
experiences.