The Old Man and the Sea: Interpretations of Symbolism

Last post I wrote about how some people analyzed that Santiago could be a symbol for Christ. First I'm going to start with a quote from Hemingway however, "No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things." I really like this quote. It shows that Hemingway didn't mean to write a novella so rich in symbolism and motifs that it would be analyzed for years and years to come. He meant to write a book about a man and a fish. That's about it, but because of his great writing talent he made a book that could be analyzed by so many for so long. The idea that the entire novel is a vaguely clothed re-telling of the story of Jesus Christ, or the idea that the lions in Santiago's dreams represent something is entirely up to the reader to decide. No one idea of symbolism is correct in this novel. Old Man and the Sea is more or less like an ambiguous movie ending. The viewer, or in this case reader, decides what everything in the novel means. Some could interpret the sharks to represent death, or some could take it the other way and interpret them as life. It all depends on what the reader thinks due to Hemingway's masterful style of simplistic writing. This quality is a very rare thing to find in a book, because most of the time the author has a simple idea in mind for symbolism and things can be interpreted in one of few ways. The quality that everybody who reads this book can take away something completely different is a one of my favorite things about this book, and one of the things that makes it such a timeless novel.