Old Man and The Sea essay by Alex M.

In the Old Man and the Sea, Santiago chooses to go out to sea trying to catch a giant marlin. However, this directly leads to his downfall. Being out at sea while you are 84 years old can and probably will be detrimental to your health. All sorts of things started to happen to him while he was at sea. First off, he was losing his physical strength. Then, he began to lose his mental strength. Finally, he came very close to being lost at sea, or at least very far from land, which definitely would have killed him.

While at sea, Santiago was exposed to tremendous physical stresses. He had to hold on the line with the marlin for an incredibly long time, more than many of us would be able to. He had to move the rudder around to steer, which, after a while, becomes very tiring to the arms. Santiago expresses his physical pain when he says: “‘I am a tired old man. But I have killed this fish which is my brother and now I must do the slave work.’”(95). It says in several passages that he cut open his hands, and that they had severe cramps. That would have been extremely painful, but he had to hold the line because he wanted to catch the marlin, even if he died trying.

Santiago also faced many mental and emotional pressures while at sea. He was alone and he had no one to talk to, which forced him to talk to himself. He noticed this and thought that it was odd because he had never done that before. He was at sea for such a long time that he was probably in a perpetual state of fear, never knowing whether or not he would be attacked by sharks, hit by bad weather, or capsize. The narrator says: “He did not remember when he first started to talk aloud.” (39) This constant isolation may have caused him to develop a form of mental illness.

Santiago was very far from land, and he could have gotten lost at sea. Although good at navigation, after several stressful days at sea, one could imagine that he could get confused or go the wrong way. He was pulled out several miles from Cuba, to a point where he could no longer see the lights of the port of Havana. The narrator explains how serious this situation was when he said, “… the glow of Havana was not so bright.” (47) This did not happen, but it could have. After several days of dehydration (he had very little water with him), it would have been easy for him to have gotten

As you can see, Santiago’s decision to go out to sea directly causes him to die in the end of the book. All the stresses, both physical and emotional, took a toll on Santiago, as it would on any normal person. It is my firm belief that Santiago never wakes up from the sleep that he takes at the very end of the book. It would be almost impossible for him to anything otherwise.