A useful presentation on Nobel winning novella of Earnest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea. Presentation is not solely imagination of the creator but based on the various study sources. Students are advised to prefer original text and critical resources for better and thorough understanding of the text.

2. EARNEST HEMINGWAY
• Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started
his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the
age of seventeen.
• After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a
volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army.
• After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for
Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to
Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.
• During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group
of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first
important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926).

3. EARNEST HEMINGWAY
• Hemingway – himself a great sportsman – liked to portray soldiers, hunters,
bullfighters – tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set
against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose
hope and faith.
• In 1920 he was shifted to Toronto and started writing features for the Toronto Star and
Star Weekly created an interest in journalism in him.
• His company in Paris inspired to write serious literature instead of mere journalistic
writing
• In 1923 his first book Three Stories and Ten Poems was published this was followed by
the publication of 32 fragments, In Our Time in 1924.
• In 1926, his two novels The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises were published.

4. EARNEST HEMINGWAY
• After the Spanish Civil War, he began his writing again and a novel based on the
Spanish War For Whom the Bells Tolls was published in 1940.
• Between 1926 and 1952 his eleven books were published, including his
masterpieces A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises and Men without Women.
• In 1952 he published The Old Man and the Sea, which put him in the showcase of
Nobel Laureate in 1954.
• By the mid of 1961 he realized that his memory once so sharp was now dull and this
led to the attempts of suicide. After the two unsuccessful attempts of suicide, he
went for the third attempt when he shot himself with his own gun in the morning of
July 2, 1961 and this attempt proved fatal.

5. PLOT SUMMARY OF THE NOVEL:
• The story of an old fisherman, Santiago, lives in a small fishing village in Cuba. He is a
weathered fisherman and to most unfortunate he has not caught any fish for 84 days. On the
85th day he is determined to catch a big impressive fish.
• Santiago has a young partner, a boy named Manolin. Santiago has partnered with him for
years. Manolin started fishing with the old man at the age of five.
• Manolin has quite an emotional thread to the old man and therefore he is extremely loyal to
him. He cares old man and looks after his safety, food and health and also discusses the
latest developments in American baseball, especially the trials of the old man’s favourite
Joe DiMaggio.
• Manolin leaves Santiago with heavy hearts in order to respect his parents and takes the new
boat.
• He feels that his 85th day will be lucky for him. Alone in the water Santiago sets up his
fishing lines with the utmost precision on his old, rickety skiff.

6. • After a long entry into the sea, at noon, he prepares his line and drops them. He feels
something heavy tugging at one of his lines. Santiago realizes it is a marlin, a big fish.
• The old man expertly hooks the fish, but unable to pull it in.
• On the contrary the huge fish begins to drag the boat.
• The struggle is crucial. His hands are cramped,
• He is cut and bruised from the force of the fish.
• The struggle between Santiago and Marlin connects them
with a strange relationship.
• Santiago feels that he is not only attached to Marlin physically but also emotionally.
• Santiago feels respect for Marlin and he admires his beauty and greatness.
• Santiago is wounded badly, but continues to feel empathy and admiration for Marlin

7. • the marlin’s blood spreads in the water that attracts sharks. At first he is attacked by a great
Mako shark that Santiago manages to slay with the harpoon, but in the struggle he looses his
harpoon and lengths of valuable rope.
• By the time night falls, he continues to fight against the scavengers,
but all his efforts are in vain as they devour the marlin’s precious meat
leaving only skeleton, head and tail.
• He sails back to shore with the carcass of his Marlin.
• He is barely able to walk and slowly staggers back to his
hut, where he falls into deep sleep.

8. • The next morning, the crowd of fishermen gathers around the huge skeleton of a fish. They are amazed to see the huge
skeleton lashing to the boat. Unaware about the old man’s struggle, tourists at a nearby café observe the remains of the
giant marlin and mistake it for a shark.

9. STYLE AND TECHNIQUE OF THE NOVEL:
When Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954, the committee cited his “powerful style-
forming mastery of the art of modern narration.”
• sophisticated patterns, repeated images, allusions, repeated sounds, rhythms, words and sentence
structure.
• Use of colloquial, objective, and unemotional language: Feature of Naturalism Ex. although the
old man suffers a good deal, the descriptions of him do not rise to emotional heights.
• use of informal speech: relaxed and powerful and putting the reader immediately to their ease.
• language of any simple and common fishermen where they people have no time to carefully-
chosen and formal words.
• Objective narration: describes the scenes as though he were neutral onlooker. The reader must
form its own opinion about the story.

10. STYLE AND TECHNIQUE OF THE NOVEL:
• Relying on blending narrative modes to achieve a shifting psychic distance: story begins
and ends with a third-person omniscient narration that does not dip into Santiago’s
thoughts.
• The beginning and end happens on the land and the significant struggle of Santiago
happens on the water.
• Hemingway’s vocabulary is sparing: suggests experience and actions behind the words.
Restricted use of adjectives.
• Use of simple and unspectacular verbs: use of the verb ‘to be’ For instance, “ It is hard
on the right hand. But he is used to punishment.”
• Hemingway ignores sidetracks and avoid structural complication. Mostly he used simple
and compound sentences.
• The central theme is conveyed by the author by repeatedly yoking religious conviction
with a belief in Luck: an appropriate sketch of Cuba’s catholic culture, affection of
games of chance

11. STYLE AND TECHNIQUE OF THE NOVEL:
• Hemingway presents religion and luck parallel as both rely on ritual and have the
power to bring optimism, dreams, faith, absorption and resolution.
• to support these repeated images and allusions he used proper sentence
structures that signal a kind of ritual or catechism.
• To conclude: swift, vivid action, the exact use of words, the exact
description and perfect sentence construction Significantly, using the raw
language of everyday life into literature,

12. SYMBOLISM IN THE NOVEL:
• The sea:
• A symbol of vast, limitless stage of life and the unpredictability of the world
around it.
• Santiago’s inner world where the struggle between his eternal enemy and friend is
continued.
• Sea is characteristically female for him which comes with reference of el mar.
• She(Sea) provides the opportunities that rule his existence and livelihood and he
understands that.
• Marlin:
• Marlin works as a force throughout the novel.
• The struggle between the old man and the fish blurs the “hunter and hunted”
relationship between them and brings them together on equal level of friendship.

13. •Allegory of Jesus:
• Hemingway through the character of Santiago represents Christ as a
man who has been perfected by his inner struggle
and courage rather than Christ as
preordained deity.
• Christ as a God has been presented as
a man of the contemporary time and is
given the new meaning.
• “He has not evolved new moral values; rather, he has reaffirmed the
man’s oldest ones- courage, love, humility, solidarity, and
interdependence.”: Clinton Burhans