After the early adulation faded, less positive reviews began to appear. Delmore Schwartz believed that the initial reviewers had prejudiced public opinion in their relief that the novella was not as bad as Across the River. Seymour Krim wrote that The Old Man and the Sea was «only more of the same», while John W. Aldridge felt himself «unable to share in the prevailing wild enthusiasm» for the novella. Years later, Jeffrey Meyers called it Hemingway’s «most overrated work», a «mock-serious fable» with «radical weaknesses». Despite the cooling critical outlook, The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction on May 4, 1953—this was the first time Hemingway had received the award, having been overlooked previously for A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls. He also accepted a Medal of Honor from Fulgencio Batista’s newly-established Cuban dictatorship, despite personally disapproving of the new regime. The Old Man and the Sea’s highest recognition came on October 28, 1954, as the only work of Hemingway’s mentioned by the Swedish Academy when awarding him the Nobel Prize in Literature; they praised its «powerful, style-making mastery of the art of modern narration».
The Old Man and the Sea has been the subject of a significant amount of critical commentary that has changed over the generations. Wirt Williams noted that early scholarship focused upon «the naturalistic tragedy, the Christian tragedy, the parable of art and the artist, and even the autobiographical mode». Analysis of these themes continued into the 1960s, during which John Killinger connected the novella with Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Friedrich Nietzsche, and Richard Hovey linked its themes to the Oedipus complex. However, Philip Young’s republication of Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration in 1966 was much less positive than the original edition in 1952, setting the disinterested scholarly tone that would dominate the next decades. Analysis only restarted in earnest with the publication of Gerry Brenner’s hyper-critical The Old Man and the Sea: The Story of a Common Man in 1991, and has continued unabated since.
Writing in 1985, Meyers noted that The Old Man and the Sea was used in English lessons in schools worldwide and continued to earn $100,000 per year in royalties. According to the CIA, it was a favourite book of Saddam Hussein, who saw himself, like Santiago, as «struggling against overwhelming odds with courage, perseverance, and dignity». The Big Read, a 2003 survey of the United Kingdom’s 200 «best-loved novels» conducted by the BBC, listed The Old Man and the Sea at number 173. Hemingway was directly involved in making a 1958 film adaptation starring Spencer Tracy. Production was marred by numerous difficulties and although the film soundtrack, composed by Dimitri Tiomkin, won the Academy Award for Best Original Score, Hemingway heartily disliked the final film. Two more adaptations have been produced: a 1990 television film starring Anthony Quinn, and a 1999 production by Aleksandr Petrov which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.
Critical analysis, Quality and accuracy
Some literary critics find The Old Man and the Sea inferior to Hemingway’s earlier works. Dwight Macdonald criticises the pseudo-archaic prose which pretends it is high culture, but in reality is anything but. He compares the novella unfavourably with Hemingway’s earlier works; he deplored The Old Man and the Sea as garrulous and repetitive when compared to the «disciplined, businesslike understatement» of The Undefeated, a short story Hemingway wrote in 1927. Similarly, Brenner characterises the novella as riddled with amateurish mistakes in style and prose. Meyers criticises The Old Man and the Sea’s melodrama, symbolism, and irony, concluding, like Macdonald, that «Hemingway either deceived himself about the profundity of his art» or expertly satisfied the desires of a pretentious audience.
Robert Weeks notes that the novella abounds in factual impossibilities—he cites Santiago’s near-clairvoyance in identifying fishes and judging weather patterns. Weeks maintains that Hemingway—previously criticized for his distaste for narrative invention—had instilled insincerity at the heart of his novel. He concluded that The Old Man and the Sea is «an inferior Hemingway novel.» Bickford Sylvester comments that most of the errors Weeks outlined were based upon faults in then-current science, and some others were intended to nudge readers towards the work’s subtext and deepest details. Sylvester argues that seemingly-implausible narrative details in The Old Man and the Sea are actually hints. He cites the baseball conversation between Santiago and Manolin, which subtly indicates not only the precise dates of the novella’s events (September 12–16, 1950) but also parallels the fisherman with his hero DiMaggio, also the son of a fisherman, who similarly resurged in performance during that week.
Themes, Classical
The novella contains significant Christian symbolism. The name «Santiago» is Spanish for St. James, the Apostle who had previously, according to the New Testament, been a fisherman, and who posthumously became the patron saint of Spain with his shrine at Santiago de Compostela. In a letter to a Father Brown in 1954, Hemingway wrote «You know about Santiago and you know that the name is no accident»; the academic H. R. Stoneback argues that this means The Old Man and the Sea has deep connections to the pilgrimage to Santiago, which is also heavily drawn upon in The Sun Also Rises. Stoneback draws an explicit link between the events of the novella and the miraculous catch of fish in the Gospel of Luke—both involve fishermen experiencing bad luck, going out into the deep sea, and taking a great catch; he also connects repeated allusions to stars in Hemingway’s text to the traditional Latin etymology of «Compostela»—campus stellae (lit. ’field of stars’). Stoneback argues that Hemingway emphasises «the humility and gentleness, the poverty, resolution and endurance of St. James the pilgrim» while de-emphasising the warrior James Matamoros; this choice «reconstructs the paradigm of sainthood».
One of Santiago’s credos is that «a man can be destroyed but not defeated», a theme which is present in most of Hemingway’s protagonists and stories, from Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises to Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Richard Cantwell in Across the River; it is also a primary theme in To Have and Have Not. Backman views Santiago as the climactic «matador» of Hemingway’s works, who manages to seek a type of natural violence quite unlike the «violent ritualized» bullfighting or «uneasily insistent» killing found in previous novels. Joseph Waldmeir similarly finds The Old Man and the Sea to contain a better synthesis of Hemingway’s views on mortality than works such as Death in the Afternoon (1932).
Many critics have drawn parallels not only between Santiago and St. James, but between Santiago and Jesus himself, especially with regard to Christ’s Passion and crucifixion. Melvin Backman outlines several, beginning with the Santiago’s wish to «rest gently … against the wood and think of nothing»; Sylvester, Grimes, and Hays also cite the preceding scene, in which Santiago is cut and bleeds from near the eye, as a stigmatic evocation of the wounds inflicted by the crown of thorns. An often-cited passage occurs when Santiago spots two sharks:
«Ay,» he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.
This passage was characterised by Sylvester, Grimes, and Hays as «a clear reference to a crucifixion»; taking place, like Christ’s death, at three o’clock on a Friday afternoon, it acts as the climax of the religious parallels. Brenner finds the Christian allusions deeply problematic, commenting that the «facile linking of Santiago’s name with Christ’s» was unnecessary and disrespectful towards the New Testament. Dismissing both Brenner’s conclusion and any approach which defines Santiago as a Christ-figure as overly simplistic, Stoneback argues that the figure of Santiago ultimately embodied Hemingway’s ideals, and was intended to be esteemed as such.
Modern
Brenner’s 1991 critique characterises Santiago as a supremely flawed individual: unintelligent, arrogant, paternalist, and anti-environmentalist. He criticises the fisherman’s inability to ignore economic considerations as he loots the sea of its treasures. He further commented that Santiago, portrayed as blatantly sexist and hostile towards all things female, was in fact feminized by his secret desire for Manolin, who was himself alternately traumatised and manipulated by Santiago’s aggression and duplicity. Brenner’s analysis has been strongly criticised: Stoneback terms it a «jejune litany of … shock-schlock critical fast-food and tired old questions», while Sylvester, Grimes, and Hays notes that «much of the book reeks of rabid exaggeration and misreading». In answer to Glen Love’s similar ecologist critiques, they write that both Brenner and Love dismiss economic realities and ask the uneducated Santiago to consider problems that few outside biology cared about in 1950.
Susan Beegel, analysing The Old Man and the Sea from an ecofeminist perspective, rejects Brenner’s view of Santiago’s sexism; instead, she writes that Santiago is in effect wedded to and at the service of the female sea. Beegel nevertheless characterises Santiago as viewing the feminine sea as tumultuous, cruel, and chaotic, and thus in need of being overcome by male power. Sylvester, Grimes, and Hays disagree, viewing Santiago’s approach as wholly respectful. Jeffrey Herlihy comments that Santiago’s Spanish heritage must be considered to be a major, and yet invisible, aspect of the novel. Even though Santiago is firmly embedded
