Muntinlupa Science High School
999 Buendia St., Tunasan, Muntinlupa City
S.Y. 2007-2008
Jonathan C. Barcena
IV-Pythagoras
Mr. Johnson Saet
November 8, 2007
A MYTHOLOGICAL-ARCHETYPAL
APPROACH READING OF
“THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA”
BY ERNEST HEMINGWAY
I. Introduction
The Old Man and the Sea of Ernest Hemingway, I may say, is one of the most enduring works that I have read. It is a novel told in language of great simplicity and power. The story deals with a Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme three-day ordeal, which is a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. The novel combines the simplicity of a fable, the significance of a parable, and the drama of an epic.
We think at times that with persistence, we can do almost everything we set our minds to do. But Ernest Hemingway went to the extreme, beyond the imagination, and created a picture as vivid as never before to get the meaning of persistent, endurance and success against all odds, a picture of defeat going through victory.
Ernest Hemingway first got his idea for this novel from the stories that he had heard in the small fish cities in Cuba by a Cuban fisherman named Carlos Gutierrez. He had known this excellent fisherman for about twenty years and the stories of the fighting marlins. It was then that he imagined that man under the two circumstances and came up with the idea. After about twenty years of pondering on the story, he decided that he would start on the novel of The Old Man and the Sea. It is said that Carlos Gutierrez is a prototype character for the old man in the story, who is Santiago.
The Old Man and the Sea can be interpreted in different ways. The novel allows various interpretations such as Christianity. The style of the work, the simplicity and the concreteness of its descriptions, provides a rich opportunity for symbolic interpretations. It provides various archetypes, images,...