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Santiago And The Marlin Research Paper

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A great marlin can be found in many people’s lives, but not everyone realizes it until they need to face it. In The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, an old man named Santiago senses his setback of eighty-four days without a fish will end when he goes out far into the sea. He faces hardships and battles ferocious sharks only to lose the marlin he captures. I never went fishing, but I can still relate the symbols in this novel to my own experiences. At the start of the novel, the marlin is what the old man desires; and while, at first, he views it as his enemy, he later regards the huge fish as his own brother and regrets killing it. By the time the old man hooks the marlin, it means more to him than another catch. It becomes the ideal …show more content…

During my freshman year, I too had my own marlin to trap, having good grades while making time to socialize, while avoiding sharks, problems and issues I faced, in the sea of life. Both Santiago and I left on a journey to find our marlin representing a person’s struggle against themself and their weaknesses. Stepping through the high school doors last August, I assumed I’d be able to catch my giant marlin, social life and good grades, within the first couple months. I represented my marlin as my 9th grade struggle of balancing friends and schoolwork because I, like Santiago, never tried to reach a similar goal before as Santiago had never seen a marlin that big in his life. At first, it was simple to “hook” my marlin at the start of school. There wasn’t a great deal of assignments to complete, and I still had my friends from middle school to chat with. Comparing this to The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago didn’t have trouble with the marlin biting the sardine on the fishing hook. He kept his lines straight in precise, so he might be ready when a fish bites the hook unlike those who go by chance and let it drift in the current. Santiago contemplates, “...I keep

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