This blog post deeply analyzes why Santiago, despite his material ruin, refuses mental defeat and remains a Stoic hero, focusing on the narrative and symbolism of The Old Man and the Sea.
Hemingway addresses themes in The Old Man and the Sea that transcend his personal experiences to touch on more universal subjects. Among these, heroism and Stoicism stand as the most central themes of the work. Santiago, who battles first the marlin and then the sharks, is a figure reminiscent of Sisyphus from Greek mythology. Sisyphus, a human protagonist of myth rather than a god, symbolizes the courage and will of humans who ceaselessly fight against their fate. Like the protagonist of that grueling task, endlessly pushing a massive boulder up a mountain peak, Santiago too endures every trial without despair, challenging his fate to the very end. Among Hemingway’s protagonists, it is rare to find a character who so majestically overcomes such numerous trials and adversities. His efforts are all the more valuable precisely because he is an old man entering the twilight of his life, not a young man like Frederick Henry or a middle-aged man like Robert Jordan.
Like other Hemingway protagonists, for Santiago, becoming a great man means acting and conducting himself with dignity, in the manner of a Stoic. On one hand, he exercises maximum self-control and discipline; on the other, he strives not to lose his sense of honor and dignity. This self-restraint, discipline, and endurance are quintessential traits of Hemingway’s heroes. Hemingway had many nicknames—Ernie, Hem, Hemi, Wemagee, Papa—but his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and their first son, John, often called him “Ernestoic,” mindful of his stoic attitude. This is unquestionably a portmanteau combining Hemingway’s given name ‘Ernest’ with ‘Stoic’. Yet this nickname ‘Ernestoic’ suits not only Hemingway himself but also fictional characters like Santiago perfectly.
As is often the case with ascetics, spiritual victory is no less precious than material victory, perhaps even more so. Santiago catches a marlin far larger than his fishing boat, but ultimately loses it all to a pack of sharks. He kills no fewer than five sharks in his desperate struggle to protect the marlin. When he returns safely to port, the marlin has been torn apart by the sharks, leaving only a bare skeleton. In the final scene of The Old Man and the Sea, a female tourist points to the marlin’s enormous backbone and asks the waiter what it is. The waiter replies, “A shark.” The tourist then remarks, “I never knew sharks had such handsome, magnificent tails.” This passage clearly reveals Hemingway’s characteristic irony. Through this ironic device, readers experience even more vividly the suffering Santiago endured in his struggle to catch this marlin.
While battling the sharks, Santiago thinks how much better it would be if all this were just a dream. He also thinks how much better it would be if, instead of fighting the fish, he were lying on a bed with newspaper spread out, resting alone.
“But man is not made to be defeated,” he said. “He can be destroyed, but not defeated.” Yet he felt truly sorry for having killed the fish. The real trouble was about to begin, because he didn’t even have a harpoon. The Dentuso shark was incredibly cruel, powerful, and intelligent. But he thought, I’m smarter than that bastard. Yet he soon wondered if that might not be true, if perhaps he was only slightly better armed than the beast.
What deserves particular attention in this quote is the line: “Man is not made to be defeated. He can be destroyed, but he cannot be defeated.” At first glance, ‘defeat’ and ‘destruction’ might seem similar. Indeed, consulting a dictionary shows the former implies losing a contest against an opponent, while the latter means being shattered and annihilated. That is, ‘destruction’ can be understood as the result of ‘defeat’. However, here Hemingway, through Santiago’s words, clearly distinguishes between material victory and spiritual victory. In other words, ‘destruction’ belongs to the realm of material and physical values, while ‘defeat’ belongs entirely to the dimension of spiritual values.
Early in the work, the narrator describes Santiago’s sail: “It was patched here and there with pieces of flour sacks, and when hoisted high on the mast, it looked like a flag symbolizing eternal defeat.” Just as his boat’s sail symbolizes, the protagonist is, by any measure, a loser and an outcast in life. The mere fact that he hadn’t caught a single fish in 84 days was enough to brand him a loser as a fisherman. In that sense, it’s not unreasonable that Manolin’s parents call the old man ‘Salao’, meaning the unluckiest person.
Yet Santiago, though seemingly defeated materially, remains mentally unshaken and undaunted. He rarely yields to adversity or hardship, exerting every effort to achieve his goal to the very end. Santiago, who may be destroyed by external forces but never mentally admits defeat, is the character who most embodies the original meaning of the word “hero.” This indomitable spirit revealed in such a heroic protagonist is the virtue and value Hemingway cherished above all else. To understand this point more clearly, we need to examine closely the conversation between Santiago and Manolin after their return to port.
“Don’t get up,” the boy said. “Here, have this.” He poured a little coffee into a glass.
The old man took it and drank it.
“I lost to them, Manolin. I lost completely to them,” the old man said.
“You didn’t lose to the fish, Grandpa. You didn’t lose to the fish.”
“That’s right. That’s exactly right. I lost after that.”
Santiago’s statement to Manolin, “I lost to them, Manolin. I lost completely to them,” is an admission of defeat. The fact that the sharks took all the marlin he had worked so hard to catch can, at least in terms of the outcome, be called a defeat. By a merchant’s reckoning, it was clearly a losing deal. Yet Manolin’s statement to Santiago, “You didn’t lose to the fish, old man. You didn’t lose to the fish,” deserves special attention.
As Manolin repeats twice, Santiago may have been physically destroyed, but he was never defeated in his attempt to catch the marlin. Hearing this, Santiago replies, “That’s right. That’s exactly right. I lost after that.” Here, “after that” refers to the time after the sharks attacked. In other words, he was never defeated until the sharks took the marlin he had fought so hard to catch. Furthermore, even though he was destroyed by the sharks’ attack, he was not defeated mentally by the goal he had set for himself—the fact that he had caught the huge fish—and in that sense, he had actually achieved victory.
Hemingway once said that rather than hoping for an uncertain afterlife, one should be faithful to life in this present world. He states, “We are part of a universe in which we can have no certainty about what lies beyond the grave. Fully aware that the end is darkness, we must create what we can in life through a practical ethics courageously drawn from ourselves.” This statement reveals an existentialist attitude toward life in several respects. Like Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus, Hemingway does not view life through rose-colored glasses, yet he neither despairs of life nor abandons it. For him, as for the existentialists, life is a singular event that must be lived meaningfully.
Santiago feels a pride born of this spiritual victory. However, it is crucial to note that his pride differs from the common understanding of arrogance. His pride is deeply connected to humility. For Santiago, these two concepts are not mutually exclusive but complementary. His pride differs in character from the hubris often found in the protagonists of ancient Greek tragedies—that hubris which seeks to transcend human limitations. Regarding Santiago’s pride, the narrator states: “He was too simple a man to have ever thought about when he had learned humility. But he knew now that he had become humble, and he knew well that this was not a shameful thing, nor did it diminish his true pride.”
Regarding the theme of The Old Man and the Sea, the Nobel Prize committee assessed the work as addressing “a natural respect for all individuals who wage a good fight in a world where the shadow of violence and death is ever-present.” The ‘good fight’ mentioned here can be understood as Santiago’s stance—one who, though physically and materially destroyed, remains mentally undefeated—without significant deviation. Santiago is a character who values the process over the outcome, the means and methods of advancing toward a goal more than the goal itself. For humans who bear death like fate, life itself may ultimately be a ‘hopeless struggle’. A battle doomed to defeat may well be the essence of human existence. Yet what matters is the indomitable spirit that refuses to easily accept such defeat, pressing forward toward one’s goal to the very end. This spirit is precisely the core of human dignity that Hemingway ultimately sought to convey to readers through this work.
