Transcendentalism In Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man And The Sea
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Although he is grateful for the little boy who provides him with company from time to time, most of the people in his village do not respect him. These private tendencies and Santiago’s willingness to stray from the crowd indicate that he is a Transcendentalist.
Another important aspect of Santiago’s personality is his optimism and resilience. Although not associated with all transcendentalists, the ability to view events in a positive light is very important for a Transcendentalist to possess. Thoreau describes this attribute as being the way in which we see the beauty all around us, by taking the bad and viewing it in a positive manner. Santiago does exactly this by always accepting the hand he is dealt. After days out at sea in a very painful position, he states, “He did not truly feel good because the pain from the cord across his back had almost passed pain and gone into a dullness that he mistrusted. But I have had worse things than that, he thought. My hand is only cut a little and the cramp is gone from the other. My legs are all right. Also now I have gained on him in the question of sustenance.” (Hemingway 74). Santiago feels that his injuries are not important, as he has experienced worse pain and what is more important to him at the time is catching the fish. Later in the book, after he finally catches the huge fish, it gets eaten by sharks on his way back to shore. Unlike a typical
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Transcendentalism In Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man And The Sea
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Ernest Hemingway is widely known for his unique characters in his stories called code heroes - however, his character Santiago from his novella The Old Man and the Sea would be better identified as a Transcendentalist. This is due to him expressing and demonstrating multiple key components of Transcendentalism including being one with nature, taking instruction from the past, inviting the future, and being self-reliant. Particularly, Santiago embraces the idea of being unified with the nature surrounding
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of America’s smartest people, spoke “The scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking” (Emerson, The American Scholar). This excerpt from Emerson’s speech The American Scholar describes a true intellectual, claiming that a man who truly thinks is the best version of a scholar, while society commonly drives people towards ruminating
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