Old Man and the Sea: Question 3

Question three asks “What universal themes does this book address and what does the author understand about human nature?”. The book I will be answering the question from is Old Man and the Sea. I could pick out two main themes throughout the book and those were hardships and strength through many outlets. The book is mainly based around the old man, Santiago El Cameon, so most of the examples of the theme revolve around him. The first general theme I picked out was hardships. This starts at the beginning when it talks about how long it had been since Santiago had caught a fish. Then it continued into when he actually went fishing and was having trouble with doing things around the boat. This included things such as setting the lines up, putting different baits and weights on the lines, steering and guiding the boat, and just general moving around on regular bases. The hardships got even worse when he caught the big fish and could barely keep a hold of it. When he finally got the fish into the boat, Santiago had even more trouble trying to fight off the sharks that were constantly coming to attack the fish. (Hemingway) All of these were huge in the book and made up about half of the general theme of the book. The other half was all the strengths portrayed throughout the book. In the beginning they showed the strength in the young boy Manolin’s body when he was carrying Santiago’s large fishing equipment to his boat. (Hemingway) The next aspect to strength was shown by Santiago when he was all alone and found the strength in his heart to not feel alone. He allowed himself to stay strong and not get upset to the point where he would break down. Santiago also showed the next portrayal of strength in his mind. This was shown when he was fighting to real in the large fish. He knew he could not do it with his body because he was too weak, he had to use his strength in his mind to outsmart the fish and he did! These two themes as you can see were repeated multiple times throughout the book making them very important to the author. The author obviously sees that humans are faces with many trials and hardships but he also knows that humans can and do use our many different types of strengths to overcome these hardships.


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