I have already finished reading The Old Man and the Sea by Earnest Hemingway. It is short. Owing to its abruptness however, I can still recall the inferential walks I took while reading the first half. Giving the contextual element of Cuba in the late 1940s/early 1950s, one can infer that the controlling ideas must be linked to communism and capitalism. Having begun his writing career as a journalist, many of Hemingway’s works contain cultural intertertextual references to contemporary journalism, placing his work firmly in the genre of Modernism (37). The Old Man and the Sea is no exception.
Hemingway uses intertextual references to Major League Baseball journalism to iterate the Old Man’s futility in resisting the inevitable. In the very first sentence, Hemingway writes, “He was an old man who…had gone eighty-four days now without catching a fish”(1), setting up the old man Santiago’s place in relation to baseball: if he were a baseball team with a record of 0-84, he would have no hope of a five hundred season. Later in the opening scene, Santiago says, “Yes, I have yesterday’s paper and I will read the baseball,” to which his boy companion reacts with suspicion, implying that the paper which Santiago produces from under his bed may be days or even years old (3).
Throughout Santiago’s struggle to catch a fish, Hemingway references Joe DiMaggio, who, as the boy points out, has other men on his team (5). Joe DiMaggio did in fact suffer from bone spurs in his heel which prevented him from playing for the Yankees in the first months of the 1949 season, quite possibly being reported on in the old newspaper Santiago is reading in the year of the story 1951 (Gaffney). Santiago compares his dire fishing performance to that of Joe DiMaggio struggling to play with bone spurs. However, Santiago does not acknowledge DiMaggio’s teammates who prevented the Yankees’ record from plummeting to 0-84 while DiMaggio was out, inferring that Santiago should give up his greedy attempts at solitary fishing and embrace the community which cares for him in Havana, embrace Communism.
Work Cited
Gaffney, Dennis. “Essay: What Made DiMaggio a Great Player?” Web. Accessed September 29, 2015. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dimaggio/sfeature/essay.html
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