An old man is fishing in the sea alone. In eighty-four days he had not yet caught a single fish. For the first forty days, a boy fished with him. Then his parents sent him to work on another, more “lucky” boat. The old man looks thin, gaunt and very old. Only his eyes are young - eyes the color of the sea.
The boy, who caught several fish on another boat, invites Santiago (the old man) to go to sea with him again. The old man is against the child leaving the lucky boat.
A boy treats an old man to beer on the Terrace. They remember how Santiago took the child into the sea for the first time and saved him from a big fish. After the beer, the boy helps the old man carry the fishing gear to the hut. Santiago falls asleep in his chair reading the newspaper. The boy brings him dinner. Friends eat and discuss baseball. At night, the old man dreams of Africa, to which he sailed as a cabin boy, and lions coming ashore.
In the morning, the old man wakes up the boy (his name is Manolin), they drink coffee and each go to sea on their own boat. The old man sails far from the shore. He feels sorry for the sea swallows, who with great difficulty obtain food for themselves; Thinking about the sea, the old man uses the feminine gender to describe it verbally, seeing a woman in it. Before sunrise, Santiago manages to lower the bait into the water. Unlike other fishermen, he does it accurately, but for some reason he is always unlucky.
The sun rises over the sea. The old man observes schools of golden mackerel, flying fish, plankton, poisonous physalia in the water, and remembers the turtles that eat them. While tracking a frigate bird, a fisherman comes across a school of tuna. When the shore is lost from sight, large fish begin to bite. He persuades her to eat, talking to himself. When the fish is firmly attached to the hook, the old man does not have enough strength to pull it out of the water. The prey goes out to sea, dragging the boat with it. Santiago waits for the fish to die. They swim half the day and all night.
The old man thinks about the fish, feels sorry for it and remembers how he caught a female marlin, whose male was with his girlfriend until his death. Santiago frees his boat of excess lines and begins to pray for the fish to appear on the surface. In the morning, a small bird lands on a string stretching from the fish to the boat. The old man is talking to her. The fish tugs on the line and injures Santiago's working right hand. The old man eats tuna for breakfast, trying to give strength to his numb left arm.
When the fish emerges from the water, the old man sees a dark purple body with soft lilac stripes on the sides, two feet longer than his boat. Instead of a nose, the prey has a sword as long as a baseball stick and sharp as a rapier.
An old man who does not believe in God reads “Our Father” and “Virgin Mary” ten times, asking them for help. He worries that sharks might attack him and the fish and remembers how he fought by force with a black man, the strongest man in the port, and defeated him. The day is coming to an end. At night, Santiago catches mackerel, guts it, and has dinner. At night he sleeps and wakes up from a sharp jerk of a fish. In the morning, the prey begins to circle around the boat. The old man tries in vain to kill the fish. His thoughts begin to get confused. When the fish gets tired of fighting, Santiago, gathering his remaining strength, kills it with a harpoon blow to the heart.
Santiago ties the dead fish to the boat. It extracts shrimp from yellow algae and eats them. It begins to seem to him that he dreamed of the fish he caught. At some point, the old man with the fish is overtaken by a shark. The old man kills her by driving a harpoon into her head. The dead shark takes with it to the bottom forty pounds of fish, a harpoon and the rest of the ropes.
Trying to cheer himself up, Santiago begins to think and talk to himself. His thoughts revolve around sins. He asks himself whether it was a sin to kill a fish, and he understands that no, it is not a sin, because he was born a fisherman, just as a fish was born a fish. The old man thinks about what he killed for food. Then he comes to the conclusion that when he killed the big fish, he felt pride, and pride is a sin. He had already killed a shark with pleasure, but in this case he was fighting for his life.
After some time, the boat is overtaken by two more sharks, broad-nose sharks, feeding on carrion. The old man kills them with a knife strung on an oar. These sharks take with them a quarter of the fish, and the best meat. The old man apologizes to the fish.
The next shark breaks Santiago's knife. The old man tries to fight with the predators that swim up at sunset with a club. Half of the fish remains. It’s hard for the old man to look at her.
At ten o'clock in the evening Santiago sees the lights of Havana. At night he is attacked by a whole school of sharks. They eat the remains of the fish. Having reached his native village, the old man goes to bed. In the morning the boy visits him in the hut. Fishermen on the shore measure a fish skeleton. The boy brings coffee to the old man and says that from now on he will go fishing with him.
Tale “The Old Man and the Sea” (summary)- one of those works that brought him fame. This one is about a fisherman who, together with other fishermen, went out to sea, wanting to catch a big catch of fish. Old man Santiago is helped by a little boy, Manolin. But for 84 days now, the avid fisherman Santiago has not been able to boast of a good catch. During this period, he loses his assistant Manolin, whom his parents take to another more successful fisherman. But be that as it may, he did not lose hope and did not give up. Even in this case, the boy visited him and sometimes they spent time together.
In one of the conversations in the cafe, the old man tells the boy that he is going to go further out to sea in search of a good catch. The boy also wants to go out with him, but the old man assures that he can handle it himself. Before going to sea, the old man and the boy spend time together. The boy brings the old man some food, then they talk together about the baseball game. It is for the good that the owner of the restaurant lends food, thereby showing pity for the old man and his companion Manolin. Night comes and both go their separate ways. The next morning they should see each other again. Manolin really wanted to accompany old man Santiago to the sea, while he himself was fishing with another fisherman. After drinking coffee, Santiago sets off for the open sea.
Already at the beginning of dawn, Santiago was at sea, gradually moving away from the shore, not far from which other fishermen were fishing. He swims with the hope of a solid catch. Before dawn, Santiago had cast his baited hooks. The old man had to wait until noon, when the fish bit. It immediately became clear to him that the fish was big, and in order to cope with it, he needed to show all his former dexterity. For a moment he regretted that he had not taken the boy with him to help. After an incessant struggle with the fish, the old man finally manages to pull it to the surface. It turned out to be a huge swordfish.
Having pacified the fish, Santiago decides to rest and spend some time reminiscing about the past, about his previous valiant successes. He feeds on the fish that he caught after going to sea. But his struggle to keep fish continues. The fish gradually gets tired. The old man, taking advantage of the moment, decides to sleep. But he is awakened by a sharp jerk, from which he almost missed his prey. The old man still managed to kill the tired fish with a harpoon. Having attached the fish to the boat, the old man headed towards the shore. He was proud that luck had finally smiled on him.
But old man Santiago’s misfortunes did not end there. Smelling the fish's blood, the shark swam. But before the old man killed her, she managed to bite off a piece of fish. Now he had to prepare for the invasion of other sharks, where he made a weapon against them from an oar and a knife. The old man never left the hope that he could get good money for such a fish. But a couple more sharks took another bite of the fish, although the old man killed them. But after them, more sharks swam in and gradually began to tear the fish into pieces. But he continued to fight to the last, although he was exhausted from pain.
Even when the old man noticed the city lights, he still continued to fight the sharks. They swam away when they had eaten all the fish meat. The old man felt defeated. Frustrated, he swam towards the shore, and the boat was moving lightly. After all, there were no more heavy fish. Arriving at the shore, he went to his home and went to bed. Manolin came and brought him coffee. The fishermen measured the remains of the old man’s fish eaten by sharks. The boy said that fishermen and the coast guard were looking for him. Now the boy firmly decided that he would fish only with Santiago, who first needed to heal his hands.
Whose stories and novels are known all over the world. In this article we will turn to the most famous of them and consider its brief content. “The Old Man and the Sea” is a work that has become a legend. Even those who have not read Hemingway at all have probably heard this name.
About the book
The story “The Old Man and the Sea” was written in 1952. For the story about the Cuban fisherman Santiago Hemingway received two famous literary prizes: the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in 1954. It will be all the more valuable for the reader to know its summary
“The Old Man and the Sea” is a work whose idea the author had been nurturing for several years. So, in 1936, an episode that happened with a fisherman was described in the story “On Blue Water.” Later, after the publication of the story, Hemingway said in an interview that his work could become a novel, since it is able to describe the lives and destinies of all the inhabitants of that Cuban village.
Hemingway. “The Old Man and the Sea”: summary. Start
The story begins with a description of an old man fishing on a boat. He had been out to sea for 84 days, but had not been able to catch even one fish. For the first 40 days, a boy walked with him. But because there was no catch, his parents told him to find another boat to help the fishermen there. And the old man apparently lost all his luck. The boy was lucky in his new place: already in the first week, the fishermen with whom he went to sea caught three big fish.
The boy looked at the old man's failures and felt sorry for Santiago. Therefore, every evening he waited for his friend, helped him carry the tackle, sail and harpoon into the house.
Main characters
It is necessary to consider the main characters of the work in order for the summary to be informative. “The Old Man and the Sea” - the title itself indicates the main character, this is old man Santiago. He is emaciated and thin, “the back of his head is cut by deep wrinkles,” “his cheeks are covered with brown spots of harmless skin cancer,” this disease is caused by the sun’s rays reflected from the surface of the sea.
The second character encountered on the first page is the boy Manolin. The old man taught him to fish. The boy is sincerely attached to Santiago and certainly wants to help him somehow. So, Manolina offers to catch sardines for bait, so that the next day the old man will have something to go to sea with.
The boy and Santiago go up to the old man's hut, poor and dilapidated, once built from palm leaves. The interior is sparsely furnished: a chair, a table and a small recess in the floor for preparing food. Santiago is poor and lonely. His only friend is a boy, and for dinner he has yellow rice and fish.
In the evening, sitting with the old man, they talk about fishing, about how the old man will certainly be lucky tomorrow, about his sporting achievements. When the boy leaves, Santiago goes to bed. In a dream, he sees his youth, which he spent in Africa.
Out to sea
The next morning the old man goes fishing again, this event continues our summary. “The Old Man and the Sea” - the title itself sets the course for the entire narrative.
This time Santiago believes in his luck. The old man sees other boats setting off and thinks about the sea. He loves the sea, treats it like a woman, kindly and tenderly. Santiago mentally communicates with fish and birds. He also knows the habits of sea inhabitants, to each of which he is attached in his own way. And having put the bait on the hook, he allows the current to carry his boat wherever he pleases. He became so accustomed to constant loneliness that he became accustomed to talking to himself.
Fish
Hemingway very skillfully portrays the relationship between man and nature in his work. “The Old Man and the Sea,” the summary of which is rich not so much in events as in the inner experiences of the hero, is a deeply lyrical and philosophical work.
The old man suddenly perks up: he perfectly senses what is happening deep underwater. The hero’s instinct does not let him down: the line sharply goes down, where a huge weight is felt, pulling it along with it. An hours-long and dramatic duel begins between the huge caught fish and the old man.
Santiago fails to pull the string - the fish is too strong, it pulls the boat along with it, as if in a tow. The old man greatly regrets that Manolin is not with him this time. And there is only one good thing in the current situation - the fish are pulled not to the bottom, but to the side. Noon is approaching, and the victim has not given up for about four hours. Santiago hopes that the fish will not last long and will soon die. But the captive does not want to give up so easily, continuing to pull the boat.
Struggle
Ernest Hemingway in no way belittles the power of the natural elements before the will of man. The old man and the sea (the summary illustrates this perfectly) - these are two opponents who have come together in a battle for life; nature and man enter into a struggle on the pages of the work.
Night falls, the fish still does not give up, pulling the boat further and further from the shore. The old man sees the fading lights of Havana, he is tired, but firmly holds the rope thrown over his shoulder. He constantly thinks about the fish, for which at times he begins to feel pity.
The summary of the story “The Old Man and the Sea” continues to develop. The fish begins to weaken and is no longer able to pull the boat at the same speed. But Santiago’s strength is also diminishing, and his hand is going numb. And then the line goes up, and a fish appears on the surface. Instead of a nose, she has a long sword, like a baseball bat, her scales sparkle in the sun, and her back and head are dark purple. And it's a full two feet longer than the boat.
Gathering her last strength, the slave again dives into the depths, dragging the boat behind her. The old man is trying to stop her from breaking down, exhausted. Almost in despair, he begins to read the “Our Father,” even though he does not believe in God. He is overcome by the idea of proving to the fish “what a person is capable of and what he can endure.”
Wandering at sea
Ernest Hemingway (“The Old Man and the Sea”) depicts marine nature incredibly realistically. The summary, of course, does not convey all the beauty of the author’s style, but it allows you to get some impression.
The old man is left alone with the sea and the fish for another day. To distract himself, Santiago begins to remember baseball games and his past. Here he is in Casablanca, and in one of the taverns he is invited to measure his strength by a black man who was considered the most powerful in the port. They sat for a day, hands clasped, at the table, and in the end Santiago managed to win. More than once it happened to him to fight on his hands, and almost always he came out victorious. Until one day he decided to quit: his hands would be useful for catching fish.
The old man continues to fight, holding the line with his right hand, knowing that as soon as it gets tired, it will be replaced by his left. The fish sometimes floats up and then goes back to depth. Santiago decides to finish her off and takes out a harpoon. But the blow fails: the captive moves away. The old man is tired, he begins to delirium and turns to the fish, asking it to give up: he’s going to die anyway, so why drag him along with him to the next world.
Last act of struggle
The struggle continues between man and nature, the old man and the sea. E. Hemingway (the summary confirms these words) shows in this confrontation the unbending will of man and the incredible thirst for life that lurks in the creatures of nature. But finally the last fight occurs.
The old man gathered all his strength, all his pain and pride and “threw it all against the torment” of the fish, “then it turned over and swam on its side.” Santiago plunged the harpoon into her surrendering body, feeling the tip pierce her deeper.
He is tired, weak, overcome by nausea, everything in his head is clouded, but with the last of his strength the old man pulls his prey to the side of the boat. Having tied the fish, he begins to swim towards the shore. And the old man’s thoughts are already focused on dreams of the money he will receive for his catch. Based on the direction of the wind, Santiago chooses the path to the house.
Sharks
But this is not the end of the work “The Old Man and the Sea” (E. Hemingway), the summary continues. The old man manages to swim not far away when a shark appears. She was lured by the smell of blood that followed the boat in a wide trail. The shark swam closer and began to tear apart the tied fish. The old man tries to protect his prey by hitting the uninvited guest with a harpoon, she goes to the bottom, taking with her a weapon and a large piece of bloody booty.
New sharks appear, Santiago tries to fight back, even kills one of them. But predators only lag behind when there is nothing left of the fish.
Return
The story “The Old Man and the Sea” is coming to an end. The chapter summaries are also nearing completion. The old man approaches the bay at night, when the whole village was asleep. He wearily removes the mast and sails. All that was left of his catch was one large fish skeleton.
The first boy he comes across is a boy, who consoles his old friend, says that now he will fish only with him, and believes that he can bring Santiago good luck.
In the morning, the skeleton is noticed by tourists who do not understand what happened here. The waiter tries to explain the whole drama of what happened, but he fails.
Conclusion
A very difficult work, “The Old Man and the Sea.” The summary, analysis and reader impressions allow us to conclude that there was no winner in the presented struggle. Although the author’s desire is undoubtedly to show the strength and power that lies in an ordinary person.
They are always taken from life and have a hidden meaning, which can only be unraveled by carefully thinking about the work you read. The writer himself was a simple and open person, so in his work the main characters are ordinary people with whom Hemingway sympathized. “The Old Man and the Sea,” a brief summary of which allows us to understand the author’s enormous talent, tells the story of the fate of a fisherman who is the embodiment of human strength, perseverance and invincibility.
Old fisherman Santiago has been coming home without a catch for 84 days. Previously, a boy, his student, fished with him, but after constant failures, his parents forbade him to go to sea with the old man and sent him with other boats. Summary of “The Old Man and the Sea” also tells about the strong friendship of two such different people. The boy loves the old man, and he feels very sorry for him; in order to somehow help his teacher, Manolin meets him in the evening and helps him carry the gear home.
The fisherman was very poor and lonely; Hemingway described his difficult life in vivid colors in the short story “The Old Man and the Sea.” The summary of the story takes the reader to the day when the man promises the boy that today he will definitely catch a fish. The fisherman goes to sea early in the morning; he is used to while away his days like this, left alone with the waves. The man conducts a continuous dialogue with birds, fish, and the sun. The relationship and feelings that the old man and the sea have for each other seem very strong.
The summary shows how well the fisherman is aware of the habits of all marine inhabitants; he treats each of them differently. Some time after leaving for sea, the old man feels that his fishing line is being stretched. He understands that he has caught a very big fish, but he is not able to pull it out. The prey does not want to give up and pulls the boat in tow further and further from the shore.
Human strength, perseverance, and excellence are all described in the story "The Old Man and the Sea." The summary reveals to the reader all the feelings of the fisherman that he experienced during the many-hour duel with the fish. He could cut the line and let it go, but he did not want to give up, although he greatly respected his prey for its tenacity and thirst for life. The next day the fish surfaced on its side, and the fisherman managed to finish it off with a harpoon, then he tied it to the boat and went home.
Smelling the smell of blood, sharks began to approach the boat, the old man fought back as best he could, but they still tore off huge pieces of meat from his priceless prey. The man sailed home late in the evening; the entire fishing village was already asleep. In the morning, getting ready to go fishing, the boy saw Santiago crying on the shore, and a huge snow-white ridge with a large tail, like a sail, was tied to his boat. Manolin calms the fisherman and says that from now on he will only work with him.
Hemingway managed to reveal real drama in the short story “The Old Man and the Sea.” The summary takes the reader to that morning when rich tourists gather near the shore to gaze at an unprecedented miracle - a huge skeleton of a fish, but none of them understands what really happened.
The main character of the story “The Old Man and the Sea” is the lonely old man Santiago. He lived on the seashore, and for many years he was engaged in his favorite activity - fishing. But hard times came for Santiago; for many days the old man could not catch a single fish.
At first he went to sea with the boy Manolin, whom he taught fishing. However, after many days of failure, the boy's parents forbade him to go fishing with the old man, considering him an unsuccessful fisherman, and found a luckier boat. And indeed, a week later, the boat on which the boy was now sailing brought several large fish ashore.
The old man looked very tired, exhausted by a hard life and numerous problems. He was unusually thin, there were many wrinkles on his face, and his skin, due to constant exposure to the sun, was covered with age spots. Some eyes were the color of the sea, retaining a young and lively color, they were blue and had a cheerful look. It was clear from the old man’s eyes that he was a strong, desperate man who was not used to giving up in difficult life circumstances.
Manolin, despite the fact that he was no longer fishing with him, still came to Santiago and helped him. Santiago's boat was old, the sail was worn out and had many patches.
One evening, after another unsuccessful fishing trip, the old man and the boy sat drinking beer on the terrace and discussing the sea. Manolin recalled his first caught fish and going out to sea with the old man. For the boy these were bright and pleasant memories.
Santiago shared his plans with Manolin; he was going to go out to sea again in the morning and try his luck. The young man offered his help to the old man to catch some money as bait for fish.
They went up to the old man's shack. Santiago's house was very poor, there was only a table, a chair, a bed, and a hole in the floor for cooking. The old man's meal consisted of rice and a small fish. Manolin supported the old man as best he could; tomorrow he would certainly be lucky, he would certainly bring home a boatload of catch.
Next, they discuss sports news, matches and athletes. After the boy went home, the old man went to bed and dreamed of his younger years, fishing in Africa, lions seen on the shore, high cliffs and white sandy beaches.
Waking up early in the morning, Santiago, taking with him supplies of water and provisions, went out to sea by boat. In the distance, many of the same fishing boats could be seen, slowly casting off from the shore towards the open sea.
Going out to sea, the old man seemed to become younger at heart; he was very attached to the sea and understood it like no one else. While in the boat, in his imagination, he communicates with the inhabitants of the depths of the sea, well understanding their gestures and habits.