THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA as an Allegory

Allegory is a literary device by which characters and actions are given two levels of meaning; one primary, literal, or ordinary, and the other secondary, symbolic and beyond the bounds of the ‘physical’ text. Allegory has its origin in Greek literature where the major schools of thought premised their arguments on ‘poetry [a term used to refer to all genres of literature] as an imitation.’ Between Aristotle and Plato, for instance, there is no disagreement about the conception of poetry as a pure imitation. The disagreement only results in delineating the function, purpose and position of poetry vis-à-vis the ideal state. Conceiving poetry as an imitation brings us to the question of interpretation. Since, in this early time, a poet was conceived of as ‘an interpreter of an interpreter’ (as propounded by Plate in his Theory of Forms), then the message he would interpret should be in tandem with the exact message being interpreted. With this, the firm link between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of a literary work was established. The earliest writer credited with establishing allegory was Theagenes of Rhegium who argued that the battle of gods in Homer’s epic can be interpreted partly as the conflict between the forces of nature and partly the warring passions in human breast. In ancient Greek, allegory literally means ‘saying other’ but it did not become the dominant approach in interpreting literature until the rise of Christian Commentary.

Allegory has been illustrated by Abrahams and Harpham as “a narrative, whether in prose or verse, in which the agents and actions, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived by the author to make a coherent sense on ‘literal,’ or primary, level of signification, and at the same time to communicate a second, correlated order of signification.” Thus, allegory imbues a literary work with two layers of signification; first, the writer selects a number of events and join them together to make a coherent whole, which in itself gives an independent meaning; second, the literal, primary meaning gives hints to a secondary, or remote, layer of signification. Hence, a story may be said to refer to a) historical and political events, or b) a collection of ideas or concepts represented by the characters, their actions or the setting itself.

‘The Old man and the Sea’ by Ernest Hemingway is an example of allegory in which, as the title suggests, Santiago; the old man, the boy and other characters, the setting included, provide a meaning in themselves to be gathered from the ordinary, literal sense of the text while, at the same time, being capable of signifying something outside the text itself. The novella was written in the1950s, few years after the Second World War. The devastating, as well as dehumanizing, experiences of the World War ⅠⅠ led to a drastic change in the various aspects of human activities, the most notable one being literature. The horror of the War manifests in post-world war literature to the extent that there is an explosion of literary works and theories that inquire into various aspects of human life hitherto treated with levity and frivolity. During this period, literature took a new dimension and many new approaches to the study of literary text and interpretation emerged and dominated literary scene up till today.
The author is said to have undergone series of depression and sickness in the later part of his life around which time the text in question was published. In an attempt to interpret it, psychoanalytical theory offers a comprehensive view of the text though there are a lot of other conflicting interpretations mounted on the text.

BACKGROUND OF THE AUTHOR
E. Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21th, 1898. His father was a physician who taught him hunting and fishing. His mother was a religious woman, active in church affairs who led her son to play the cello and sing in the choir. His early years were spent largely in fighting his mother’s influence. He spent the summer with his family in the woods of northern Michigan where he often accompanied his father on professional calls. The discovery of his father’s apparent lack of courage and his suicide after several years left the son with emotional scar.
Hemingway volunteered for active service in the Infantry; after United States of America joined the First World War in 1917, and was rejected because of eye trouble and thereafter he was enlisted in the Red Cross medical service driving an ambulance on the Italian Front. His early writing started after this time. However, his re-engagement in the Second World War made him to lapse into a literary silence. In 1952, he published The Old man and The Sea after his marriage with Mary Welsh with whom he moved to his new residence near Havana, Cuba. His journey to Africa planned between him and his wife ended in a plane crash over Belgian coast, Congo. He was admitted to Mayo clinic to be treated for hypertension and depression and was later treated with electroshock therapy. Embittered by an illness that humiliated him physically and impaired his writing, he killed himself with a shotgun on July 2, 1961.

PLOT SUMMARY
Santiago is an old fisherman, on Cuban coast, living in an isolated cottage near the sea. He has a boy apprentice who helps him with fishing and brings him food and other necessaries when his parents decide he should not go on fishing with the ‘unlucky’ old man who by that time has gone eighty-four days without catching any fish. On the eighty-fifth day, the old man goes on sea again to try his luck and disprove the society’s conception of him as unlucky. The old man catches a big marlin; bigger than his skiff. He fights with this marlin for three days before he can eventually kill him.
On his way back, sharks attack and destroy the big fish and he arrives on shore with only skeleton attached to his skiff in the night. As soon as in his shack, he falls asleep, keeping his mind away from the fish. He goes back to his dream of African coast and lions. The boy finds him sleeping in the morning and goes out to get him some food. When he wakes up, they plan going to fishing the next day.

ANALYSIS
From the title of the text, the first thing that comes to mind is the struggle between man and sea; man and his society; man and his conception of self. The old man is depicted as lonely, isolated, poor and unlucky fisherman. It has been eighty-four days since he caught his last fish. His young apprentice left him after forty days on the instruction of his parents. This sets the initial problem in the novella. It can be understood that the old man is faced with issues such as: the fact that the society knows of his misfortune, that he lost the boy who helps him with fishing, his weakening power and fear of losing his dignity and self-respect. His desire therefore is to regain his dignity and prove to his society that he still has a role to play. This existential problem, i.e. old age and the role to play at that age, makes him depressed and resolved to go far out in the sea to catch the big fish. As in psychosocial analytical perception, the old man is at a stage where he needs to assess his life and integrates it into his personality (a concept described as individuation). Two things may likely occur, that is, either integrity or despair.

The image of the big fish represents both psychological value and the missing part of the old man’s life. The big fish will give a psychological relief to him by changing his society’s view of him and, thereupon, integrity and positive conception of self. Therefore, the big fish is crucial to the completeness of his personality development.

The boy, too, serves as a psychological relief to the old man and a contact between him and the external world. The boy makes him remember his early life when he was just like the boy. In this light, the boy represents the old man’s longing for his childhood which was full of heroic adventures. The boy is also depicted as part of him; a tool without which fishing is more or less impossible for the old man. Realizing that, the old man cries while at sea: I wish I had the boy. The image lion and the coast of Africa, where his youth began and which the old man often dreams of, strengthen the boy’s symbol and points towards the old man’s desire to regain his youth strength.
The peripeteia {structural division by Marie-Louise von Franz} of the story shows the man on the sea, lonely and struggling to catch big fish. The old man identifies himself with animals like the big fish, shark, and tuna. He drinks shark’s liver every day to get strength. This shows his inner conflict and fear of losing his strength which is all he has to prove to his society that he is still important. He admires tuna because their heart does not cease to beat even after they have been killed. He claims that his heart is just like theirs. This symbolizes the old man’s wish for longevity because he is yet to get the missing part of his life and integrate it with his conception of self.

He struggles with big fish for three days before he could kill him and, during this struggle, he raises questions whether or not it’s right for him to eat that fish, etc., a contemplation on the natural order which makes man as a predator and fish as his prey though without any logical reason why one would deprive another of his life just to satisfy some needs. However, the big fish is depicted, at times, on the same level as man and at heights even man’s predator as the fish takes control of the old man and his skiff for three consecutive days and, even after the old man kills him, he cannot bring him in.

The sea, on the other hand, symbolizes giving-and-taking phenomenon and stands for the unconscious part of the old man’s mind in the story. The unconscious part control and influences the conscious part of the mind. This is to say that, since the big fish comes from the sea, he is part of the unconscious which the old man needs for its integration into his personality. The fact that he kills the fish, the old man gets the psychological value necessary for his harmonic reconciliation between the conscious and the unconscious part of his mind. The appearance of sharks, moments later, shows man as a reversal of the predator-and-prey relationship in the text. The old man and his psychological value are now prey to the sharks who in a short time destroy the fish. Santiago turns his mind away from the fish at the end since he could not protect the fish from being mutilated.

The finale presents an old man with fish skeleton attached to his skiff coming to shore despondently at night. Since the psychological value he fought for is gone, he turns his mind to baseball which signifies despair and helplessness. His perception of life helps him to withstand the misfortune however. He assures himself that ‘every day is a new day.’ The old man still goes back to his dream of lions and Africa, which indicates how much he misses his childhood and his innate desire to remain strong, important and relevant despite old age.

The end of the novella is open and at the same time ambiguous as the old man still plans to go to sea because man is never defeated but destroyed. Supported by the gain and loss of the big fish as a psychological value, his plan for future adventure implies his strong determination to complete the missing part of his personality at all cost. Also, the polarity indicated in the novella, i.e. the boy and the old man, the teacher and student, apprentice and his master, novice and experienced, is reinforcing, at one point, the fact of missing part of the old man and, at another, giving psychological relief to him as an experienced fisherman because it reminds the old man of his past accomplishment though he has not been lucky in the last ninety days.
Secondarily, in ‘The Old Man and The Sea’, the old man, shown from the beginning as a lonely, poor, and psychologically depressed individual but who tries to assert himself by struggling with and comparing himself to different types of fish while at sea, always gives his attention to the baseball paper which is the connection between him and the happenings outside his desolate world and likes adventures, praises, while still trying hard to maintain his strength, the cause of those praises, by drinking shark’s liver and drawing inspiration from the arduous struggle of the fish. This character of Santiago makes him dissatisfied with his present condition resulting in his later breaking away in search of the balm to that ‘wound’. This represents two phases of Hemmingway’s life. Firstly, lack of courage on the part of his father and dominating personality of his mother, made Ernest Hemingway to be uncomfortable and to eventually break away from home which was as desolate as the old man’s in the story. He joined two World Wars as a revolt against his father’s lack of courage and his mother’s influence. His revolt against his familial disposition and background manifests between the old man’s struggle with fish which, on one hand, represents female principle and the old man’s determination to vanquish it by hook or by crook, for man is never defeated but destroyed.

Towards the end, he is able to kill the fish and the symbolism then shifts to the psychological aspect of the story which yields bad result eventually. This stands for the series of depression, the authorial character, i.e. the old man, undergoes. The old man feels relief that though his value has been badly destroyed by sharks at least he once had something. This implies the author’s reflection on his achievements though interrupted toward the end of his life. The novella ends ambiguously. The reader may expect the old man to despair at the loss of his big fish, but is surprised with the old man’s hope for another catch. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the old man will catch another big fish in his future adventure. But, implicitly, he has achieved individuation by integration of the child archetype, represented by the boy, into his personality and the feeling of hope which gives psychological relief to the old man that he still has a role to play in the society and his life.
E Hemmingway’s later life was ambiguous too, because, with all those achievements he garnered, he still felt depressed and wanting. This feeling led him to commit suicide. At the time when The Old Man and The Sea was published he was hanging between hope and despair; still struggling, and this can lead one to conclude that if he had written the book in the later years of his life, the old man might have been a despairing authorial character, or even suicidal, in the story.

In conclusion, ‘The Old Man and The Sea’ is Ernest Hemingway’s best-selling novella which accounts for an old fisherman’s struggle with fish at sea. Interpretively, the various depiction and description of the central character imply the human inner conflict of his conception of self and his role in the society at various stages of his personal development. On the secondary level of interpretation, the author manifests in the story and symbolically analyses his own personality and life crises.