This second section of the part that takes place at sea is much longer than either of the two parts that take place on land and comprises the story’s central action and its most dramatic moments. While Santiago’s struggles in this section can be viewed collectively (as some critics have suggested) as a single trial lasting three days, they can also be considered according to his three principal adversaries: the marlin, the mako shark, and the shovel-nosed sharks. Either way, each challenge is at once game and rite, requiring both luck and faith.
In this section, Hemingway increasingly shifts from the omniscient narrator to Santiago’s perspective, combining narrative modes with devices such as letting Santiago talk aloud to himself, presenting a third-person narration of his thoughts, and drifting subtly from either of these into a kind of interior monologue. To convey this limited stream of consciousness (a depiction of the actual flow of thoughts and feelings as they pass through a character’s mind), Hemingway simulates a supposed disorganization in the way thoughts leap into the old man’s fatigued mind. Yet the technique actually relies on a loose connection of ideas deliberately tied together through recurring images, allusions, actions, and themes.
Throughout this section, Hemingway fully dramatizes actions and themes that he introduced or foreshadowed in the novella’s previous pages. For example, several incidents appropriate to this marine setting anticipate the section’s significant battles: the man-of-war bird chasing the flying fish suggests Santiago trying to land the great winged marlin; the tired warbler harried by hawks anticipates the worn out Santiago’s struggle with the sharks. Here, Hemingway also reintroduces the earlier baseball allusions and images, and the themes those allusions and images advance. When the marlin first jumps, Santiago describes its sword as the length of a baseball bat. After his battle with the shovel-nosed sharks, Santiago wishes he had had a bat. In both cases, Hemingway again connects the marlin and Santiago to the endurance and nobility of the great DiMaggio. Hemingway also unfolds and further dramatizes Santiago’s prodigious skill as a fisherman and his dedication to his craft. And Hemingway again yokes a belief in luck with religious conviction, as when Santiago alternates between wishing for luck in catching the fish (which he is afraid to mention for fear it won’t happen) and praying to God to make the great fish swallow the bait, to help him land the fish, and to help him defend the fish against the sharks.
Supporting this reintroduction or repetition of actions, images, allusions, and themes, Hemingway uses a stylistic technique of repeating sounds and rhythms, words and sentence structures. For example, when Santiago prepares to eat the dolphin fillets and the two flying fish he found inside the dolphin, Hemingway writes, “Back in the bow he laid the two fillets of fish out on the wood with the flying fish beside them.” The use of language (in this case, the repetition of sounds) suggests incantation and ritual and serves the same function as the catechism-like structure of earlier conversations with Manolin, thereby reinforcing the same images, allusions, and themes.
These repetitions and reintroductions complement the novella’s many cycles: For example, the novella’s basic structure comes from Santiago’s journey from the land, to the sea, and back to the land again. The nature of all life consists of a passing on of collective knowledge and memory from one generation to the next, as well as a passage from youth to old age. The natural order binds together all creatures in mutual dependency and a common fate as hunter and hunted, predator and prey. (As Santiago points out, “everything kills everything else” in the world.) Even Santiago’s fate represents a cycle—from the failure of 84 days without a catch, to the hard-won victory over the marlin, to the tragedy of its loss to the sharks, to the redemption at the story’s end.
From the moment Santiago feels the marlin’s first tug at the other end of the line, he feels connected to it in a variety of ways, as he does to his brothers the flying fish, the turtles, and the porpoises. Oftentimes, Santiago anthropomorphizes (endows with human characteristics and feelings) the creatures he feels connected to. So he refers to the marlin as “he,” although he cannot know its gender. As he and the great fish remain locked in battle, he first pities and admires the fish and then empathizes and identifies with it. When the marlin lurches forward and the line cuts Santiago’s hand, he immediately assumes that something must have hurt the marlin, as he himself is hurt. He muses that both he and the fish have made choices that inevitably led them to be locked in this life-and-death struggle, isolated, with no one to help either of them. Just as the marlin was born to be a fish, Santiago reflects, he was born to be a fisherman. In the inevitability of their circumstances and their suffering, both seem reminiscent of Job.
Santiago also resembles St. Francis of Assisi in recognizing the connection of all living creatures. His conversation with the warbler bird that must eventually face the hawks as it heads toward land is just one example. When Santiago’s own left hand cramps, he feels betrayed and humiliated by it, and his attitude and response suggest St. Francis of Assisi’s mockery of his body as “Brother Ass” whenever it failed him in his calling. In fact, recurring references to the cramped left hand (and the old man’s claws) compare it to the eagle’s claws, the hawk’s claws, even the shark’s teeth that are crisped like claws.
