The Old Man and the Sea: A Young Man’s Perspective

Sam Rocha
10 min readJan 16, 2021

Introduction

The Old Man and the Sea is a tale of fishing, the ocean, a marlin, an old man, and a boy written by Ernest Hemingway in 1951. It is known for being a concisely written story. In this essay, I will present my thoughts on The Old Man and the Sea. I will summarize it and then present a commentary where I will go through the book again, chronologically providing reflections from my reading of this book. My goal is to write about my perspective of The Old Man and the Sea and take the reader along on my journey through this book.

Summary

The story starts near the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Cuba. We are introduced to the old man. This introduction talks about his connection with the boy. In this scene, Hemingway surveys the characters and introduces the reader to their personalities through a conversation between the old man and the boy. The topic of this conversation goes from fishing to fishing bait to baseball and finally, to bed.

In this conversation, we learn that the old man has had trouble fishing. As we see, he has not caught any fish for eighty-four days. The boy is also forced to go with other boats that have luck catching fish. The old man does not seem discouraged by his lack of catching fish.

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