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A collection of slides to support classroom discussion on some of the underlying themes in Hemingway's novel.
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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