The Pride of the Fisherman

The Old Man and the Sea 

by Ernest Hemingway

“You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?”   ― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

"I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures." Santiago is the old man of the title, a poor Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. The other fishermen now call him unlucky, and his great friend, the boy Manolin, has been forbidden from fishing with him any more. On the eighty-fifth day Santiago decides to go farther out than usual, farther than the other fishermen go, in an attempt to find a great fish. On that day he hooks a huge marlin, and the struggle for dominance and survival begins.

This is more than a story of the battle to catch a great fish. When you join the old man in his boat you begin to realize his immense love for the boy, for the sea, and for the fish. It is this and his vision of lions on a beach that gives him the courage to go on and with that persistence the cheerfulness that allows him to continue day after day.

This is the book that brought Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize and ultimately the Nobel. It presents man alone against Nature in the simple style that Hemingway perfected. I first read this long ago and have since experienced other of his novels, but this remains foremost in my memory.