Q1 Blog 2: Waiting

In the second quarter of The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, the old man finally gets a large fish to take the bait at around noontime. He attempts to pull it in, but noticing that the fish will not budge from its own course, he decides to wait until the fish tires and surfaces. During the night, the old man begins to pity the fish caught on his hook and remember another time he felt bad when he caught a female marlin as the male watched. This pity is demonstrated in the quotation "He is wonderful and strange and who knows how old he is, he thought," which serves the novel by humanizing the fish and showing how the old man's attitude toward it develops. Throughout the rest of the quarter, he just waits for the fish to jump so that he can pull it onto the boat, but the fish continues to swim, dragging the old man and his skiff away from the port. This whole section does not seem to advance the plot very much, if at all. The old man does several not important things, like shifting the weight of the line and washing his hands, so nothing really affected the situation of the plot. The long, drawn out, monotonous wait instead serves to mirror and exemplify the old man's perseverance and steadfastness in a time of apparent hopelessness. Also, the vivid language used to describe the somewhat unimportant actions helps to put the reader in the place of the old man. Because of the imagery, the reader feels as if he or she is in the skiff with the old man, feeling each long hour that the fish swims beneath the water, out of reach of being caught. This emphasized the old man's pride and the theme of suffering and struggling. Eventually the fish does jump and the old man sees how big and majestic it is. He feels a slight pang of remorse in hooking it, but also strong determination that he would kill it. This became the old man's sole focus, as he puts killing this fish before his own health and well-being. This blind determination kind of surprised me, because as an experienced fisherman, he should know that having a sound mind and body is essential for survival and fishing. I feel like he should have fed himself, rested, and tended to his wounds more carefully than he did. However, his primary focus also made sense because of the way his mind is latching onto this one ray of hope after several months of nothing; in his mind, this is the only way for the old man to stay a true fisherman.