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The Sea And The Old Man

Good Essays
Jason Chadwick
Mr. Spence
Freshman Honors English
October 31, 2014
The Sea and the Old Man
An old man, alone in the ocean with no other humans in sight, struggles to pull an eighteen-foot marlin close enough to his boat to strike the killing blow. He is tired, and almost at the end of his strength. He thinks to himself, I will try one more time. In The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway, protagonist Santiago finds himself in an ongoing struggle for dominance. He must persevere through pain and adversity in order to catch a giant marlin, and then make his way back home afterwards. In the beginning of the book, Hemingway paints a picture of what the “code” hero, or ideal character, would be. Santiago is definitely one of these code heroes. Throughout the book, he shows incredible perseverance through difficult situations, he recognizes his flaws and accepts them, and he faces death, of both his goal and himself, without fear or concern.
Santiago’s perseverance is a clear sign that he is one of Hemingway’s code heroes. In both his everyday life and his fight with the marlin, Santiago does not give up and endures whatever pain may come. At the beginning of the book, Manolin reminds Santiago of how they “went eighty-seven days without fish and then …caught big ones every day for three weeks’” (10). Santiago has had to go through hard times, “eighty-seven days without fish,” but he still perseveres through the hardships and in the end comes back from the hard times. Even
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