The Old man and the Sea bookreport
The Old man and the Sea bookreportThe Old Man and the Sea
For my summer reading book I read “The old man and the sea” by Ernest Hemmingway. This story is about an old man named Santiago who is the main character in the book. Santiago is a Cuban fisherman who used to be a sailor when he was young. He Traveled to Africa and still has dreams about the lions he saw when he went there. He still has memories from the past when he caught other fish and of arm wrestling matches.
Santiago is thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotched of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face. His hands had the deep creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh, they were as old as erosions in a fishless desert. He likes to read about baseball in the Newspaper, talks about Joe DiMaggio and the New York Yankees, he likes to sleep when he gets home, and he drinks coffee and beer at the Terrace. Everything about him was old, except his eyes that are the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated. He has good eyes for an old man because many old people don’t have every good eye sight at his age.
Santiago lives in a one room shack that is made of the tough bud shields of the royal palm that are called “guano.” There was a bed, a table, one chair, and a place on the dirt floor to cook with charcoal. On the brown walls of the flattened, overlapping leaves of the sturdy fibered “guano” there was a picture in color of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and another of the Virgin of Cobre. These were relics of his wife. Once there has been a tinted photograph of his wife on the wall but he has taken it down because it made him to lonely to see it, so he put it on the shelf in the corner under his clean shirt.
Santiago has been very unlucky for the past eighty four days because he hasn’t caught a fish so now he fishes alone. He used to fish with his faithful friend Manolin but after forty days without catching any fish Manolin’s father made him switch on to another fisherman’s boat. Santiago taught Manolin how to fish when he as five years old and has been a loyal friend every since. Manolin visits with Santiago everyday when he comes back with his skiff in with it empty and Manolin feels sad and always goes down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with four flour sacks, and it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.
The eighty fifth day at sea Santiago rowed so far away from the harbor that he couldn’t see the other fisherman’s boats. The old man saw the stick go under the water and he knew that a fish had taken the bait on one of the lines. When he tried to pull the fish up it wouldn’t raise an inch and the fish started to tow him father and father out to sea. He held the line against his back, hoping he could wear the fish down so that he could kill it but the fish didn’t give up. The fish kept on pulling him for hours, and hours. The fish pulled him so far out that he couldn’t see any part of the land. Before sunrise Santiago started to feel sorry for the fish because it had been pulling him for hours all through the night and early morning.
Santiago started to feel the fish slow down, and he hopes that the fish would jump so that it would fill the sacks along its back bone with air and then the fish wouldn’t go deep to die. Then suddenly the fish gave an unexpected pull and it caused the fishing line to slice though his hand. Even with the blood on his cramped hand Santiago still hold on to the fishing line. When Santiago was holding the line with his cut hand the fish finally jumps out of the water and the fish that had towed him so far was two feet longer than his skiff. It was the biggest fish that he had ever seen and bigger than he had ever hear of. He wished the boy were here so that he could see how big it was.
Santiago was hungry so he decided to catch a fish and eat it. After he caught the small fish he sliced it up and ate it. He was really tired so he thought that he would have a quick nap otherwise he couldn’t keep his head clear. Santiago woke up from his nap because the marlin was jumping in and out of the water more than a dozen times.
On the third day the marlin started circling the skiff. Santiago was getting very tired. He was so tired he began to get dizzy. He needed more sleep but he had to kill the marlin first. The marlin began circling it took four or five times for it to come close enough to the boat that the old man could spear it with a harpoon. Santiago had to put all his strength into the marlin because it was such a strong fish. He pushed so had that the marlin rose high out of the water showing all his power and beauty. The marlin finally died and Santiago strapped it to the side of his skiff. But there was a problem because the marlin was bleeding from the harpoon wound that it attracted a Mako shark that bit forty pounds of meat off the marlin before Santiago could kill it with the harpoon. The marlin was bleeding even more now and more sharks were coming. When they came Santiago killed most of them by stabbing them in the brain with the harpoon, and beating them with a club, using a knife attached to one of the oars as a subsitute harpoon because the harpoon had been taken by one of the sharks, and tiller as weapons. There were to many sharks for Santiago to kill, it was useless fighting them, because the sharks had taken most of the marlin meat and there was like nothing left. Santiago arrived back in the middle of the night. He pulled his boat back in, took the mast down and put it on his shoulders, and walked but he had to stop five times before he got back home to his shack.
In the morning Manolin went down to the harbor and saw the marlin carcass. The other fishermen were out there looking at it and talking about how big it was. One fisherman had a measuring tape and measured it. It was eighteen feet long. Manolin went to Santiago’s shack and when he saw the old mans hand he began to cry. He walked down the road to the Terrace crying and he didn’t care if anyone saw him crying. A fisherman shouted to Manolin and asked him how Santiago was and Manolin said that he was still sleeping and for no one to disturb him. When he got to the Terrace he got a can of coffee for Santiago. Manolin walked up the road to the old mans shack and waited for him to wake up. When he did the old man asked if anyone looked for him and Manolin said that they had boats and coast guard planes searching for him. Manolin left again to bring food, newspapers, and medicine for Santiago’s hands. When Manolin got back the old man was sleeping again. The boy was sitting by his side watching him. The old man was dreaming about the lions.
When I first started to read the book I thought it would be a real boring one. I thought that the book was okay, but it could have had more interesting parts in it. I didn’t dislike the book but I just thought that it was a little bit boring in the beginning and in the middle of the book. I think they could have described the boy
(Manolin) a little better and maybe tell what age he was. The book would have been better if maybe there was a storm out in the ocean when the man was out at sea and what he had to go though or something like that. But over all the book was okay but I wouldn’t read it again.
I wouldn’t recommend the book for a friend to read because I think that they would feel that same way I do about it. I think that they would say that it was somewhat boring. They wouldn’t like that book and they would probably say that they dislike the book. I think that this is a book for people who like to go fishing or like to sea and would like to read a story about fishing for a big fish.