The Old Man and the Sea

by Ernest Hemingway

Reviewed by Eric Zhang

Fall 2016

REVIEW: The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway
ISBN: 9780099908401#

THE STORY:

Old man, Santiago is a fisherman that lives by himself on a wharf side in Cuba. This story takes place in 1940(s), when the baseball player Joe DiMaggio was still alive. In the 1940(s), people in Cuba went fishing every day and mostly talked about baseball. Throughout the story, the old man goes through hardships of fishing, mainly because the old man hasn’t caught a fish in eighty four days and needs to catch one, so that he doesn’t rely on other people’s help of surviving. Old man thinks that the eighty fifth day of fishing is a lucky day and he will catch something, like all the other days. Old man decides to go fishing further than anyone has been, which eventually leads him to the hardest days of fishing, he has ever experienced. One of major events that occurred in the story was when the old man caught his third fish which was a huge marlin. The old man had the fish tied to his boat and was on his way home when the old man saw two sharks heading towards him. The old man had a club and did his best to fend of the sharks. After a while of fighting, the two sharks left and the old man had reached his destination. Exhausted, the old man went to his shack and slept until the morning of the next day. The old man understood why the sharks had left, for they had gotten a free meal from the old man. What was left of the marlin was a huge skeleton. The old man learns that hard work is essential to achieving better outcomes, even though he fairly caught a skeleton. The old man never gave up and continues to go fishing.

MY OPINION:

When I began the book, I felt like it was boring, because the life of a main character was like every other fisherman’s life as fisherman. I felt like the story was going to have a lot of words that I didn’t understand and some of the words were Spanish words used to describe a certain thing. As I began to read further into the book, I started to see the conflict, and the story began to become more interesting. The Spanish words became more easier to understand, because I could interpret the word out of the context clues that came after the Spanish word. Some of strengths in the story, was that the author would give deep descriptions about subjects and used metaphors to relate one subject to another. I felt sad for the main character, but also admired him at the same time for the main character was having problems fishing, but the main character continued to go fishing and never gave up. I think that the message that the author was trying to convey was that: “No matter how old you are, you can never give up and you always have to advance, even if you feel like giving up.” I felt like there weren’t any weaknesses, even though there may have been some non understanding parts, personally for me, because some materials and skills and the ways of saying something in a fisherman’s language was kind of hard to understand. I would recommend this book to people in middle school and above, due to its use of hard vocabulary and some Spanish words located within the story.

STUDY QUESTIONS AND VOCABULARY:

FIRST SECTION

1. What is the name of the old man and the boy?

1a. The old man’s name is Santiago and the boy’s name is Manolin. (pg. 10 & 27)

2. Where does the old man plan to do, after his eighty-fourth day without fish?

2a. The old man plans to go far away from the harbor, farther than anyone has gone before.

(pg. 14)

3. What is the old man a fan of? What team does he like?

3a. The old man is a fan of the Yankees and he like to watch baseball. (pg. 17)

4. What is the part of ocean, the fishermen called Great Well?

4a. The Great Well is a sudden deep drop of seven hundred fathoms, where there are all kinds of fish. (pg. 28)

5. What is the first kind of fish the old man saw?

5a. The old man saw big dolphins. (pg. 34)

gaff (pg. 15)

resolution (pg. 23)

phosphorescence (pg. 28)

terns (pg. 29)

iridescent (pg. 35)

MIDDLE SECTION

6. What happened when the old man tried to pull the fish up?

6a. The old man used all his strength and pulled the fishing rod, again and again, and also pivoted the weight of his body, but nothing happened. (pg. 44)

7.What does the old man keep repeating?

7a. “I wish the boy were here.” (pg. 57)

8. Describe the fish that the old man had on his fishing rod.

8a. The fish’s back was dark purple and sides were stripped with light lavender. The fish had a sword as long as a baseball bat. (pg. 62)

9. What subject does the man talk about when he is bored?

9a. The man talks about baseball and how baseball players could catch the fish that was on the end of his rod. (pg. 68)

10. What did the old man dream of when he slept?

10a. He dreamed of vast schools of porpoises. He dreamed of being in a bed in a village. He dreamed of long yellow beach with lions. (pg, 81)

imperceptible (pg. 43)

undulation (pg. 60)

ptomaine (pg. 62)

kerosene (pg. 69)

ceding (pg. 83)

                               

LAST SECTION

11. Why did the old man choose the flying fish rather than the dolphin to eat?

11a. The old man knows that the dolphin is better tasting than the flying fish but the dolphin will cause nausea, so he decides to eat the flying fish instead, which will only cause a little dizziness. (pg. 85)

12. What did the old man describe the fish on the end of his line?

12a. The fish was big and had huge pectorals that were spread wide. The fish’s tails was higher than a big scythe blade and was a pale lavender over the water. (pg. 90)

13. How did the old man tell which direction he was going in without a compass?

13a. The old man knew the direction of the way he was going by feeling the trade wind and drawing a sail. (pg. 97)

14. How did the old man tell that the shark was going to die?

14a. The old man saw the shark’s eye and he knew that the shark was going to die, because the shark’s eye was dead. (pg. 102)

15. What happened to the fish the old man had caught?

15a. Two sharks started attacking the fish that the old man had caught by taking bit by bit of the fish. The old man tried to fight the sharks off, but the it was no use because the sharks kept attacking his fish. (pg. 112-114)

commenced (pg. 86)

bitt (pg. 95)

vertebrae (pg. 109)

perceptible (pg. 117)

barracudas (pg. 127)