The Old Man and the Sea Question 3

If there is one universal theme that is constantly portrayed throughout this book, it would have to be the concept of struggle. If you think about it for a while you will realize some very important things. Unfortunately I will not be giving you enough time to think about it. So here is my conclusion after thinking about it. The entire book is filled with the old man struggling against something. The book starts out elaborating on how the Old Man has been struggling to catch a fish for over eighty days, and due to this he has lost his favorite fishing companion. Then he goes out and finally gets a fish, ending the previously stated struggle. Unfortunately, it takes him three whole days to catch said fish, with every day filled with struggle. Finally, after catching the fish, he has to struggle against several shark attacks. These sharks manage to eat the fish, thus ending another struggle in the book. These would be the major struggles in the book that help to prove my point, and they do that pretty well. Another thing about these struggles that I noticed, is that they mostly end in failure for the Old Man. His struggle to finally catch a fish after so long ends in him catching an eaten fish, along with some others that he ate, so this one wasn't a complete failure. The others though, were pretty much failures. His struggle against the fish ended horrible, because the fish didn't live long enough while dead to be able to be eaten by a human, or even sold, so it was rendered useless to the Old Man. Then his whole struggle against the sharks didn't go well, thus ending in more failure. The Old Man doesn't really care about all this failure, because he was just doing it because he wanted to, thus showing something about Hemingway's perspective on human nature. That being that humans are resilient.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the sea. New York: Scribner, 2003. Print.