Santiago Character Analysis

Table of Contents

1. Santiago Character Analysis

1.1. Introduction
1.2. The Story of Santiago
1.3. Santiago’s Moral Victory
1.4. The Initial Portrait
1.5. A Literary Immortal
1.6. Santiago and Jesus
1.7. Santiago’s Humility
1.8. Santiago’s Piety
1.9. Santiago’s Compassion
1.10. Santiago’s Optimism
1.11. Santiago Versus Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner
1.12. Santiago’s Solidarity with The Natural World
1.13. Santiago’s Martyrdom
1.14. A Moral Realist
1.15. The Problem of Sin
1.16. Went “Too Far Out.”
1.17. Non-Christian Saintliness
1.18. Santiago’s Endurance
 1.19. The Old Man’s Triumph
1.20. Santiago, The Undefeated
1.21. The Code Hero
1.22. Related posts:

Introduction

The Old Man of the title is a sherman by trade. He bears the tting name of
Santiago. The word “Santiago” literally means Saint James who was originally a
sherman living close to the Sea of Galilee and subsequently became an apostle.
Eventually he su ered martyrdom.

The Story of Santiago

Early one morning after months of bad shing luck, he rows out alone into the Gulf
Stream near the island of Cuba. Towards noon of the rst day, he hooks a gigantic
marlin. For two days and two nights it pulls him in his boat far northward and
eastward while he hangs for dear life on to the heavy line, a human towing bitt,
ghting a battle of endurance against the power of the sh. On the third day, again
nearly at noon, he succeeds in bringing the marlin to the surface and killing it with
his harpoon. Since it is too large to be put aboard, he lashes it alongside his ski
and sets his small, patched sail for the long voyage home. Then, one by one, two by
two, and later in large numbers, the sharks attack the dead marlin. By the time the
Old Man has reached his native harbour, there is nothing left of the marlin except
the skeleton, the bony head, and the sail-like tail.

Santiago’s Moral Victory

The Old Man loses the battle he has won. The winner takes nothing but the sense of
having fought the ght to the limits of his strength, of having shown what a man
can do when it is necessary. He is undefeated only because he has gone on trying.
Enemies break through Santiago’s lines of defence and take away his possession.
As for Santiago himself, he has reached a condition of absolute physical exhaustion
as well as an absolute but not abject humility. Both have cost him almost
everything, which of course is the price one must always nally pay. Santiago’s
victory is the moral victory of having persisted in his purpose without permanent
damage to his belief in the worth of what he has been doing.

The Initial Portrait

The warmth of our sympathy can be traced in part to the way in which the portrait
of Santiago himself has been drawn. “He was an old man,” the story begins, “who
shed alone in a ski in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now
without taking a sh.”

A Literary Immortal

Strictly speaking, the man Santiago is only a simple sherman, like his namesake.
But like Wordsworth’s leech-gatherer, another old man going about his lonely
professional work, Santiago acquires a high dignity. In both cases an individual is
singled out and presented in terms of a contest of endurance that seems to be
symbolic of human life. Both Wordsworth’s leech-gatherer and Hemingway’s
sherman belong to the gallery of literary immortals.

Santiago and Jesus

Santiago bears a signi cant relationship to other characters in the Hemingway

canon. Hemingway had felt interested in the proposition that there must be a
resemblance between Jesus Christ in his human aspect as the Son of God and
those countless thousands of men in the history of Christianity who belong to the
category of “good men”, and may therefore be seen as disciples of Our Lord. The
young priest in A Farewell to Arms is an early example. The old Spaniard
Anselmo, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, is a later example, Santiago shows certain
qualities of mind and heart which are clearly associated with the character and
personality of Jesus Christ. There the essential gallantry, a kind of militant spirit.
There is the stamina which helps in his determination to endure whatever is to
come. There is the ability to ignore physical pain while concentrating on the larger
object which is to be achieved.

Santiago’s Humility

Santiago’s humility is of that well-tested kind which can co-exist with pride. “He
was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had
attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride.”
When his own disciple, Manolin, calls him the best sherman, Santiago replies:

“No, I know others better.”

The great sh that Santiago is soon going to ght against will not, of course, prove
Manolin to be wrong. Quite the contrary. But when the Old Man nally defeats the
marlin, we are told that his pride has been gone for a long time, forced out by his
su ering. The humility remains as the natural companion of his immense fatigue.

Santiago’s Piety

Although Santiago is often jocular about his religion, he is yet a pious old man. The
piety appears in his constant unquestioning awareness of a supernatural power, at
once outside and inside his personal struggle. His allusions to Christ, to God, and to
the Virgin are never oaths; they are simple petitions to a supposedly available
source of strength of which he feels the need. “Christ knows he can’t have gone,”
he exclaims in the uncertain interval before the sh is actually hooked. “God let
him jump,” he prays soon after dawn on the second day. “God help me to have the
cramp go,” he says, when his left hand has become temporarily useless.

Also Read:

The Old Man and the Sea Themes

The Old Man and the Sea as an Allegory

Santiago’s Compassion

Along with humility, pride, and piety, Santiago is richly endowed with the quality
of compassion. Coleridge’s ancient mariner had said: “He prayeth best who loveth
best all things both great and small.” Santiago, however, does not love all creatures
equally. He dislikes, for example, the Portuguese men-of-war. “Agua mala,” says he
to one of them, “You whore.” Outwardly handsome, inwardly lethal, these beings
strike him as the falsest things in the sea. The sharks too he looks upon as his
enemies. But his hatred is more than overbalanced by his simple love and
compassion for other creatures. His principal friends on the ocean are the ying
sh. He loves the green turtles and the hawksbills with their elegance and speed.

Santiago’s Optimism

A professional and seasoned sherman, Santiago always thinks that new day will
bring new hopes and hence he continues his e ort of shing without knowing the
result.
“Eighty ve is a lucky number.”

Santiago says that if the past is hopeless, future will be hopeful. He should never
give up his e orts but on working hard in order to make his future bright and
promising. If the past is full of miseries and su erings, it does not mean that he
should give up his e orts. The new rising of the sun will certainly pave his way to
success. He believes that constant e ort brings glory in life. After all “Life’s not a
child’s play”. Hence Santiago is a true epitome of optimism.

Santiago Versus Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner

Coleridge’s ancient mariner comes to share with Hemingway’s Old Man (who may
also be called an ancient mariner) this quality of compassion. But while Coleridge’s
ancient mariner achieves this through a prolonged ordeal, Santiago already has
this compassion as by a natural gift. The act of shooting the albatross is in no way
comparable to Santiago’s killing of the marlin. One is meaningless and arbitrary:
the other is professional and necessary.

Santiago’s Solidarity with The Natural World

Hemingway’s heroes sometimes lose touch with Nature and may, as a result, come
to grief. Jake Barnes in the Parisian cafe-circle (in The Sun Also Rises) and
Frederic Henry in the tangle of war in Italy (in A Farewell to Arms) are two
memorable examples. But Santiago is never out of touch. The line which ties him to
the sh guarantees that the alliance will remain unbroken. Santiago is even more
closely allied with birds and sh than Saint Francis was with his animals and birds.
When the bird has own way, he is momentarily struck by a sense of his aloneness
on the vast waters. But he presently realizes that no man is ever alone on the sea.
This feeling of solidarity with the visible universe and the natural creation is one
more factor helping to sustain him through his long ordeal.

Santiago’s Martyrdom

Santiago’s experience is a form of martyrdom. The Old Man’s only fault, if it is a

fault, consists in doing to the best of his ability what he was born to do. He does
nothing wrong from the moral point of view, but this does not prevent his
martyrdom. His ordeal by endurance is comparable to a cruci xion, and he attains,
by virtue of his courage and persistence, a kind of dei cation or apotheosis.
A Moral Realist

Santiago’s humility and simplicity do not allow him to mar his achievement by any
conscious martyrdom. “Man is not made for defeat” he says at one point. “A man
can be destroyed but not defeated.” His resolution is always strengthened by some
such thought as this, and he acts in accordance with it. These qualities of
determination and action sustain hat point when he knows that his only remaining
course is to take what comes when it comes. The arrival of the sharks on the scene
does not surprise him. He does not expect for a moment that they will let him
escape uninjured. He is moral realist.

The Problem of Sin

Yet Santiago feels certainly troubled by moral and metaphysical questions. One is
the problem of whether there is any connection between sin and su ering. “It is
silly not to hope,” he thinks to himself after the killing of the Mako shark, “Besides I
believe it is a sin.” In this way he enters into a consideration of the problem.
“Perhaps,” he speculates, “it was a sin to kill the sh. I suppose it was even though I
did it to keep me alive and feed many people.”

Went “Too Far Out.”

Although Santiago admits to pride and lays claim to love, his moral sense is not
fully satis ed by this way of resolving the problem. He looks for some other
explanation. What he seems nally to decide upon is the notion that he had gone
“too far out.” This concept of going too far out implies a fearless e ort of the soul
and a willingness to take a greater risk where a greater prize is promised. Very
early in the book a contrast is established between near and far, between the lee
shore and the Gulf Stream. There are the in-shore men, those who work within
sight of land because it is easier, safer, and less frightening. And there are those
who, like Santiago, have the boldness to reach beyond the known. “Where are you
going?” Manolin asks him, on the eve of the eighty- fth day. “Far out,” replies
Santiago.

Non-Christian Saintliness

And yet Santiago’s saint-hood is of a non-Christian order. His charity for instance,
arises not from the feeling that all are God’s creatures but from a sense that he and
all natural creatures participate in the same pattern of necessity and are subject to
the same judgment, “Take a good rest, small bird”, he says to the warbler which has
come to rest on his shing line. Similarly, his faith and hope rest, not upon any
belief in a just and benevolent God, but upon his belief in man’s ability to endure
su ering.

Santiago’s Endurance

In a sense, The Old Man and the Sea is a study in pain in the endurance of pain and
in the value of that endurance. The old sherman shes as much for a chance to
prove himself as he does for a living, and though he fails to bring the giant marlin
to market. Starting in simple physical pain, he transcends his own heroic ideal,
personi ed in DiMaggio, and ends in the attitude of the cruci ed Christ: “He slept
face down on the newspapers with his arms out straight and the palms of his
hands up.” All this he endures without compromising his code either as a man or
as a sherman: he succeeds in showing “what a man can do and what a man
endures.”

The Old Man’s Triumph

The fundamental qualities of the Old Man’s character his humility, his simple and
pagan reverence for the conditions and processes of life, and his capacity for
su ering serve to transform his defeat into a triumph as much as the divinity of
Christ transforms the terror and sorrow of the Cruci xion into the promise of life.

Santiago, The Undefeated

Santiago is not an entirely new character in Hemingway’s ction. He is

development of the code hero as depicted by Hemingway in some of the previous
novels. In fact, Santiago is the code hero grown old and wiser. He distinctly
reminds us of Manuel Garcia, the bull- ghter in the short story “The Undefeated”
who lost in one way to win in another. Like Manuel Garcia, Santiago is a ghter
whose best days are behind him. But he still dares; he sticks to the rules, and he
will not quit when he is beaten. He remains undefeated; he endures; and his loss is
itself a victory.

The Code Hero

“A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” This is how Hemingway states his
theme in this novel. And the theme is familiar to Hemingway readers. Familiar too
is the remark: “What a man can do and what a man endures.” This is the rst time,
in all Hemingway’s work, that the code hero and the Hemingway hero become
almost one. Santiago represents the Hemingway hero having developed into the
code hero.

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4. The Old Man and the Sea as a Tragedy
5. The Old Man and the Sea as a Classic | Book Review

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2 thoughts on “Character of Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea”

Rupaligupta
July 19, 2022 at 9:27 pm

Amazing

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Somnath Sarkar
July 22, 2022 at 8:46 am