Ernest Miller Hemingway, one of the most significant writers of the 20th century, gives an epic account of man''s struggle against the forces of nature in The Old Man and the Sea. Throughout The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago is given heroic proportion...
Ernest Miller Hemingway, one of the most significant writers of the 20th century, gives an epic account of man''s struggle against the forces of nature in The Old Man and the Sea. Throughout The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago is given heroic proportions: the courage, the strength and the will of man to fight against the forces of nature. For Hemingway, to live is to fight. He believes that human beings need some moral rules for life because the bitterness of life is inescapable. In The Old Man and the Sea, these rules are the courage and the endurance, in other words, the Stoicism. However, Hemingway''s Stoicism is different from other Stoicism in that it is 'the positive Stoicism,' the Stoicism with ecstasy. From the beginning to the end, the theme of solidarity and interdependence makes a relation between the Santiago''s heroic individualism and his fellow creature''s spiritual assistance play important parts. Moreover, the young boy, baseball, his heroic past and Lions offer him courage whenever he meets a deadly trauma, so he could fight against nature. After all, he has leaned much during a few days of fishing voyage though he suffered a lot. He is now able to pronounce a judgement upon the inscrutable human exictence and man''s destiny. His failure has thus turned out to be his moral victory, which is the essential outcome of the Hemingwayan Stoicism.