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.
