Santiago fights the mako, enduring great suffering, and eventually kills it with his harpoon, which he loses in the struggle. The great tear in the marlin's flesh releases the fish's blood and scent into the water, attracting packs of shovel-nosed sharks.
With whatever equipment remains on board, Santiago repeatedly fights off the packs of these scavengers, enduring exhaustion and great physical pain, even tearing something in his chest. Eventually, the sharks pick the marlin clean. Defeated, Santiago reaches shore and beaches the skiff. Alone in the dark, he looks back at the marlin's skeleton in the reflection from a street light and then stumbles home to his shack, falling face down onto his cot in exhaustion.
The next morning, Manolin finds Santiago in his hut and cries over the old man's injuries. Manolin fetches coffee and hears from the other fisherman what he had already seen — that the marlin's skeleton lashed to the skiff is eighteen feet long, the greatest fish the village has known. Manolin sits with Santiago until he awakes and then gives the old man some coffee. Unable to tie the line fast to the boat for fear the fish would snap a taut line, the old man bears the strain of the line with his shoulders, back, and hands, ready to give slack should the marlin make a run.
The fish pulls the boat all through the day, through the night, through another day, and through another night. It swims steadily northwest until at last it tires and swims east with the current. The entire time, Santiago endures constant pain from the fishing line.
Whenever the fish lunges, leaps, or makes a dash for freedom, the cord cuts Santiago badly. Although wounded and weary, the old man feels a deep empathy and admiration for the marlin, his brother in suffering, strength, and resolve. On the third day the fish tires, and Santiago, sleep-deprived, aching, and nearly delirious, manages to pull the marlin in close enough to kill it with a harpoon thrust. Dead beside the skiff, the marlin is the largest Santiago has ever seen.
He lashes it to his boat, raises the small mast, and sets sail for home. While Santiago is excited by the price that the marlin will bring at market, he is more concerned that the people who will eat the fish are unworthy of its greatness.
The first to attack is a great mako shark, which Santiago manages to slay with the harpoon. They reminisce a while, talk of Santiago's plans for going out the next day, and then go to Santiago's shack. Because Santiago has nothing to eat, Manolin fetches Santiago the dinner that the Terrace owner, Martin, sends for free, as he has many times before. As Santiago eats, he and the boy talk of baseball, the great Joe DiMaggio, and other topics of mutual interest. The next morning, Santiago picks up the boy at his house.
They have coffee which is all that Santiago will have all day at an early morning spot that serves fishermen. The boy fetches sardines and fresh bait and helps the old man ease his skiff into the water.
They wish each other good luck, and the old man rows away. The first quarter of this novella takes place on land, in a small Cuban fishing village on Tuesday evening, September 12, and Wednesday morning, September 13, The novella's point-of view in this section is that of an omniscient narrator in the sense of knowing more than any one character and having access to the perspectives of multiple characters.
With the exception of minor shifting to Manolin's thoughts, this third-person narrative is limited to and concentrates on Santiago and his actions. What readers know of Santiago's thoughts in this section of the novella comes from the narrator's statement of them, although this perspective later shifts when the story shifts to the sea.
Most of this section's activities represent the characters' preparations for Santiago's setting out to sea on Wednesday morning for what will become the story's great struggle. Yet almost immediately those activities become surface realism, details that are mentioned but mostly glossed over and seen as the routine Santiago usually follows. On the other hand, Hemingway's preparations here not only set the stage but predict the plot of this deceptively simple tale, touch on the story's multiple themes, and begin to reveal in the story and its characters layers of meaning and larger and larger significances.
From its first paragraphs, the novella is replete with religious images and allusions. After 40 days without a catch in Santiago's boat, Manolin's parents have sent him out with another fisherman because they believe that Santiago is unlucky. The number 40 here suggests the stories of Noah who also had to endure social separateness and ridicule and endure great hardship on a boat at sea and of Moses who was able to see the Promised Land and lead the children of Israel to it but never dwell there himself.
Likewise, Manolin's catch of three fish his first day out with the other fisherman suggests the three days the people of Israel went without water before Moses struck the rock, the Trinity, and the story of the loaves and fishes that fed the multitude of Christ's followers. Santiago's name is Spanish for St. James, an apostle and fisherman.
Men who are kind to Santiago are named Perico and Pedrico both forms for Saint Peter and Martin for Saint Martin , suggesting disciples, spiritual followers, or men of faith. On the wall of Santiago's shack hangs a portrait of the Virgin of Cobre, the patroness of Cuba.
Even Manolin's name the diminutive of Manuel is Spanish for Emmanuel, the Redeemer, although the full significance of his name becomes clear only at the story's end. While entirely appropriate to Cuba's pervasively Catholic culture, these images and allusions suggest far more than any sectarian or even broadly religious dogma as many critics, including Arvin Wells and Philip Young, have mentioned.
These images and allusions run parallel to other images and allusions just as appropriate to Cuba's culture — such as a passion for baseball its heroics and statistics and an enthusiasm for games of chance such as the lottery. These images and allusions span the secular to the profane and yoke religious conviction to a palpable belief in luck, which is also mentioned in the first paragraph.
For example, one of the places in which Hemingway yokes religion and baseball occurs when Santiago tells Manolin that the Yankees must have won their game, and Manolin expresses his fear that the Yankees will be beaten by another team.
Their discussion follows the formal ritual of religious instruction, and indeed Santiago uses the discussion to remind Manolin to have faith and resist fear: "Be careful or you will fear even the Reds of Cincinnati and the White Sox of Chicago.
This yoking is neither derogatory nor blasphemous. Like religion, baseball and games of chance rely on ritual and have the power to engender hope, dreams, faith, absorption, and resolution so integral to this story — ultimately taking people beyond themselves.
Together, these images and allusions suggest a theme of transformation and a larger spiritual dimension possible in the human condition: Human beings can summon imaginative vision, as well as physical endurance, creating the capacity to withstand and even transcend hardships. That central theme radiates beyond the surface realism in this very human tale of an impoverished old man, his love for a young man who also loves him, and his trials in bringing in a big fish.
Certainly that story is central, and Hemingway the journalist would have nothing less. Still, the theme's possibilities also push this tale toward allegory — a story with a surface meaning and one or more under-the-surface meanings; a narrative form so ancient and natural to the human mind as to be universal; a form used in pagan mythology, in both Testaments of the Bible, and in Classical to Post-Modern literature.
In short, the novella invites, even demands, reading on multiple levels. Hemingway's early descriptions of Santiago support the central theme and foreshadow predict the novella's ostensibly simple yet artfully designed plot. The old man's shirt, like his sail, is patched beyond all recognition.
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