the old man and the sea exam preparation

The Old Man and the sea

Advanced preparation

Santiago’s expatriation from Spain & ethnic ‘otherness’

Spanish colony & Independence

A Spaniard living in a culture unsympathetic to a former occupier

Hemingway chose a Spanish name and nickname

Santiago cannot afford to go ‘home’ and attempts instead to reduce the differences

between himself and his adopted community

The Virgin of Cobre & the Sacred Heart of Jesus

Santiago’s wife a native of Cuba?

Oshun – goddess of womanly love, marriage and rivers

YellowRed

CopperGoldEggs

Latin American vernacular vs. Native Canarian speech patterns

Cuban meaning Spanish meaning

Unlucky Salty

Dolphin fish Golden

Man of war jellyfish Bad water

White-tipped shark Well-dressed

Salao

Dorado

Agua mala

Galano

A Cuban hat – the fedora

Gregorio Fuentes or

Carlos Gutierrez

Lions on a beach?

Spanish lions

“The community of Cojimar may acknowledge his angling skills but Santiago remains a man in exile, isolated and without a social community”

Jeffrey Herlihy

Santiago’s existential struggle

The pointlessness of human effort

“Hemingway makes us remember that we are as permeable as these creatures; our flesh is vulnerable – and our bodies will be degraded too.

The humiliation of lifelessness are contained in us”

William E. Cain

Hemingway – fisherman, hunter, ambulance driver, war reporter, soldier

The blood flows in the novel

Theatre of cruelty

“I think I felt his heart”

“It is not just that he has taken life but also that he has experienced what it is like to die”

Hemingway and the crucifixion

May 1926 ‘Today is Friday’

Eli Eli lama sabachthani

“For Hemingway Jesus was not a redeemer but the peerless embodiment of a life of pain.

Jesus accepted a mission; he knew he was dead the moment he was born. He embraced it freely because he knew that through death,

eternal life was offered to all mankind. For Hemingway there was no life after death and

his abiding concern came to be why and how a dying person (we are always dying) makes

art.”

William E. Cain

“I keep thinking what a wonderful old man he would have made if he’d learned how. I don’t

think he had faced up to growing old”

John Hemingway

“My father lived with the knowledge of what the edge of nothingness is like”

Gregory Hemingway

“I am a writer driven far out past where he can go, to where no one can help him”

Nobel Award Acceptance speech

The creative act and a temporary escape from oblivion

The price of an existentially lost writer with nothing left to say

Santiago’s and the eternal feminine

There are 2 characters in the title!

The tragic love story of a mortal man for a capricious goddess!

Gendering the sea - Le mar

Combative

Exploitative

An enemy

Gendering the sea - La mar

Nurturing

Maternal

Cruel

Changeable

Appeasing the fierce feminine with love and respect

A widow who is ‘never alone’

Wedded to the marlin – children of the same mother

An elegy for the sacred hunt – the death of subsistence fishing

‘I ruined us both’ – the ram of pride?

‘Bad luck to your mother’ – Santiago as both inside and outside of nature

Harmony restored with a fair wind?

The legacy of Manolin?

‘why are the lions the main thing that is left’?

The novel explores the relationship between individualism and interdependence – the tragic irony is that man only comes to wisdom and

harmony through suffering and isolation.

The sharks may be seen as a punishment for the sin of reaching beyond his place in life.

Why the emphasis on a team sport and the best ‘team player’ in the business?

Why the dream of lions?

Hemingway’s vision of man is tragic but ennobling

“We are part of a universe offering no assurance beyond the grave and we are to make what we can of life by a pragmatic ethic spun bravely out

of man himself in full and steady cognizance that the end is darkness.”

E. M. Halliday

We are doomed

There is no escape

Suck it up and take a stand anyway

Live life out loud BECAUSE we have no future – life is all the more precious because it is fleeting