Okay, so first off, I would like to apologize for my choice in blog title, but there some points that I was planning on peppering in on some of my other blog posts, but they did not seem like they would be used without it seeming like I pulled the idea out the blue and decided to just put it with a thought that did not have anything to do with it. So I decided to dedicate a couple of blogs to these “random” points.
One of the main things that I was thinking about throughout the book was, “Why do they keep calling the old man, well, the old man? Did the author not want to have to capitalize Santiago every time?” The same could also be said about Manolin, or as you might know him, the boy (the old man only called him by name twice [Hemingway 26,91]). Then after I read the rest of the book, it was apparent that Hemingway is a spectacular author and there was most likely a reason why he only called the characters by their labels: The old man, the boy, the fish, etc. In my opinion, I think that the reason Hemingway did not use their names is because the characters themselves represented a set of characteristics, and they did not need names. They were merely personifications of traits that Hemingway and most everybody else would like to have themselves. The old man represents perseverance and skill. The boy shows extreme loyalty and independence when he basically tells the old man that he does not care what his parents say, nothing is going to stop him from fishing with the old man (Hemingway 91). The fish shows endurance like the old man. The sharks are also another character that is a package of traits. They are basically the only thing in the book the does the old man wrong when they eat the fish. They represent greediness, gluttony, and pure evil. They ate the hard and almost fatal work of the old man. It did feel kind of good to have the old man kill a lot of the sharks though.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner, 1980. Kindle. Web. 21 June 2011.
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