Old Man and the Sea Term Paper

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The only thing young about Santiago was his eyes, Hemingway wrote - but an alert reader knows that baseball is for the young at heart, age notwithstanding.

And also, any baseball fan worth his salt knows that the Yankees had a great player named DiMaggio (Joe), who had his own struggles. Those comparisons of DiMaggio and Santiago are part of the meat of the book. While certainly DiMaggio had hall-of-fame credentials, he also had his share of injuries (including a painful bone spur). Like Santiago, DiMaggio had bad luck (someone stole his bat during the middle of his 56-game hitting streak in 1941, which still stands today). And Santiago can keep his mind off his bad luck (84 days without catching a fish) by thinking about baseball.

Santiago wants to be "worthy of the great DiMaggio, who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel... [and] What is a bone spur?" (p. 68). Santiago wonders what if DiMaggio were out there in a boat alone, and a huge marlin - with a "sword...as long as a baseball bat" - was giving him more fight than he could handle? Would the great Joe DiMaggio "...

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stay with a fish as long as I will stay with this one?" (p. 68).

Conclusion: Hemingway has hooked the reader with all of his descriptive narrative, with his dramatic plot, and he has netted the reader with the poignant baseball allusions, allegories and metaphors. It is also fitting that "3" is used in the story, since you get three outs each inning, there are three bases, three outfield positions, and three strikes and you're out. Hemingway teaches the reader to find a theme and stick with it; the sun rose "for the third time since he had put to sea..." (p. 86); he first saw the fish "on the third turn" (p. 89); and Santiago was injured three times during the fight to land the fish (his head, p. 52; his right hand, p. 55; and his left hand cramped, p. 58). And even though the story didn't have a perfect ending - Santiago brought home the skeleton of a giant fish, rather than a complete fish - what the reader "catches" in the literary net that Hemingway provides is far more valuable than any Marlin could ever be.

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