A collection of slides to support classroom discussion on some of the underlying themes in Hemingway's novel.

1. The Old Man and the sea Advanced preparation

2. Santiago’s expatriation from Spain & ethnic ‘otherness’

3. Spanish colony & Independence

4. A Spaniard living in a culture unsympathetic to a former occupier

5. Hemingway chose a Spanish name and nickname

6. Santiago cannot afford to go ‘home’ and attempts instead to reduce the differences between himself and his adopted community

7. The Virgin of Cobre & the Sacred Heart of Jesus

8. Santiago’s wife a native of Cuba?

9. Oshun – goddess of womanly love, marriage and rivers

10. YellowRedCopperGoldEggs

11. Latin American vernacular vs. Native Canarian speech patterns Cuban meaning Spanish meaning Unlucky Salty Dolphin fish Golden Man of war jellyfish Bad water White-tipped shark Well-dressed Salao Dorado Agua mala Galano

12. A Cuban hat – the fedora

13. Gregorio Fuentes or Carlos Gutierrez

14. Lions on a beach?

15. Spanish lions

16. “The community of Cojimar may acknowledge his angling skills but Santiago remains a man in exile, isolated and without a social community”Jeffrey Herlihy

17. Santiago’s existential struggle

18. The pointlessness of human effort

19. “Hemingway makes us remember that we are as permeable as these creatures; our flesh is vulnerable – and our bodies will be degraded too. The humiliation of lifelessness are contained in us”William E. Cain

20. Hemingway – fisherman, hunter, ambulance driver, war reporter, soldier

21. The blood flows in the novelTheatre of cruelty

22. “I think I felt his heart”

23. “It is not just that he has taken life but also that he has experienced what it is like to die”

24. Hemingway and the crucifixion

25. May 1926 ‘Today is Friday’

26. Eli Eli lama sabachthani

27. “For Hemingway Jesus was not a redeemer but the peerless embodiment of a life of pain. Jesus accepted a mission; he knew he was dead the moment he was born. He embraced it freely because he knew that through death, eternal life was offered to all mankind. For Hemingway there was no life after death and his abiding concern came to be why and how a dying person (we are always dying) makes art.” William E. Cain

28. “I keep thinking what a wonderful old man he would have made if he’d learned how. I don’t think he had faced up to growing old”John Hemingway

29. “My father lived with the knowledge of what the edge of nothingness is like”Gregory Hemingway

30. “I am a writer driven far out past where he can go, to where no one can help him”Nobel Award Acceptance speech

31. The creative act and a temporary escape from oblivion

32. The price of an existentially lost writer with nothing left to say

33. Santiago’s and the eternal feminine

34. There are 2 characters in the title!

35. The tragic love story of a mortal man for a capricious goddess!

36. Gendering the sea - Le mar Combative Exploitative An enemy

37. Gendering the sea - La mar Nurturing Maternal Cruel Changeable

38. Appeasing the fierce feminine with love and respect

39. A widow who is ‘never alone’

40. Wedded to the marlin – children of the same mother

41. An elegy for the sacred hunt – the death of subsistence fishing

42. ‘I ruined us both’ – the ram of pride?

43. ‘Bad luck to your mother’ – Santiago as both inside and outside of nature

44. Harmony restored with a fair wind?

45. The legacy of Manolin?

46. ‘why are the lions the main thing that is left’?

47. The novel explores the relationship between individualism and interdependence – the tragic irony is that man only comes to wisdom and harmony through suffering and isolation.The sharks may be seen as a punishment for the sin of reaching beyond his place in life.

48. Why the emphasis on a team sport and the best ‘team player’ in the business?

49. Why the dream of lions?

50. Hemingway’s vision of man is tragic but ennobling

51. “We are part of a universe offering no assurance beyond the grave and we are to make what we can of life by a pragmatic ethic spun bravely out of man himself in full and steady cognizance that the end is darkness.”E. M. Halliday

52. We are doomedThere is no escapeSuck it up and take a stand anywayLive life out loud BECAUSE we have no future – life is all the more precious because it is fleeting