“I read this as a young man and was disappointed. It didn’t work for me. I thought it was a crazy old man gone off the reservation, picking a fight with an innocent fish while ranting about the New York Yankees. I picked it up again, after the passage of some years, and found it incredibly poignant…Age teaches you a lot of things. You realize that you might never be the person you thought you’d be as a child.” 

When looking for my next book, this review caught my attention written by Matt, of Ernest Hemingway’s best novel, The old man and the Sea. The ending paragraph of his review talks about his takeaways from the novel. “Days go by, you start to lose more and gain less. I thought about this as I thought about the old man…an old man nearing the end of his days fighting against nature, time, and death.”

The Old Man and the Sea is a novel about the laws of human nature. We follow Santigo, an old fisherman who fishes alone, in a skiff, on the Gulf of Mexico. The readers are immediately introduced to the problem in the first paragraph of the book, “..It had been eighty-four days now without catching fish..” Santiago knows his big catch is coming soon, and the next day he takes his skiff far out into the ocean. 

The battle with his giant fish lasts for three days, when he finally kills the fish he questions himself, “ Perhaps it was a sin to kill the fish. You did not kill the fish only to keep them alive or to sell them for food. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you love him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it much more…You think too much old man.” When Santigo reaches the shore nothing left remains of his once giant fish. 

After finishing the novel, it’s my turn to write my own review of this book. Trying to keep away from a literature essay, I want to start by describing my feelings throughout this story. I felt intense emotions reading this, moments of happiness and despair. The Old Man and the sea seem like it’s a story about man versus nature; however, after finishing, I believe it is a tale about man versus man. The entire story is just one metaphor around the trials of human nature. The sea is life, the old man is humanity, and the fish is the battle we have with life. It shows even more when Santigo returns to the shore with his biggest catch eaten whole. To interpret this novel is to understand what is most important in life. We must seek the battle within ourselves, but we also must be careful because sometimes what is important is what we most often overlook.