The Old Man and the Sea in 10 Minutes: A Fish Skeleton, and an Iceberg

The plot: three days and three nights, from setting out to nothing but bone

Day eighty-five, sailing out alone On the morning of the eighty-fifth day, Manolin sees the old man off as usual. This time Santiago is determined to go far out into the Gulf Stream, where the real big fish are — but he also knows the distance is a gamble with his life. Every other boat in the village stays close to shore; he alone heads far out. A craft note: Hemingway's opening pages are almost plotless, nothing but the old man laying out his gear and talking with Manolin, the small stuff of an ordinary day. But this slowness isn't padding — it's easing the reader into a rhythm, the same rhythm the old man has been grinding through, day after day, for eighty-four days. Hemingway makes you learn his slowness first, so that the extremity of the three days and nights to come can actually knock you flat.

The big fish takes the bait The line sinks hundreds of feet down and something heavy finally seizes it. One tug and Santiago knows: this is no ordinary fish, this is something enormous. Instead of being hauled up the way a normal catch would be, it pulls the skiff in the opposite direction — dragging the old man along for a full day and night. The line cuts the old man's hands open and blood drips from his palms, but he grips the rope and will not let go. Hemingway writes this — a man being towed across the ocean by an unseen giant — in a tone almost like a sports broadcast, flat and controlled. Read it long enough and your own shoulders start to ache.

Three days and three nights of tug-of-war This is a genuine war of attrition. As long as the fish won't surface, the old man won't let go; as long as the old man won't let go, the fish keeps towing the boat. By the second night and the third day, the old man starts talking to the fish: he tells it he loves it, he respects it, but today he is going to kill it. This is the strangest and most moving moment in the whole book — that something like reverence could grow up between a man and his prey. By the end the old man is so exhausted he's dizzy and seeing spots, his hands cramping, but with the last of his strength he drives the harpoon into the great fish's flank and subdues a marlin longer than his own skiff, then lashes it to the boat's side. A craft note: how do you write three days and three nights without putting the reader to sleep? Hemingway's trick is to keep switching scale — the wide shot carries the epic standoff between man and fish, the close shot is a cramping left hand, a cramping right hand, an aching shoulder, blurred vision. This pulling the epic back down into bodily detail is his single greatest skill.

Sharks come to the blood The moment the great fish is lashed to the boat, the water changes color. Blood seeps down the hull, and the sea tens of yards off starts to darken. The first to arrive is a single mako shark, the fiercest and smartest kind. The old man still has his harpoon and kills it with one thrust — but loses the harpoon with it. Then the sharks come in packs. The old man fights them with a knife lashed to an oar, then with the oar alone, and finally with the tiller — losing one weapon after another, losing the great fish inch by inch. A craft note: this is the most suffocating stretch in the whole book. Hemingway lays out every shark attack in plain fact, with no ornament at all — just it comes, I strike, I strike again, I couldn't hold it. The sharks keep coming, the old man keeps weakening, and at some point the reader suddenly realizes: this fight stopped being about whether he can win a while ago. It's just about how much longer he can stay standing.

Nothing but bone makes it to shore By the time Santiago rows the skiff back into harbor, the great marlin is nothing but a white skeleton with the tail still attached. The whole body has been eaten away, and only the bones remain to prove it was ever there. The old man is so spent he can barely crawl into his shack, and falls straight to sleep. The next day the fishermen on shore gather around the skeleton to measure it, and every one of them is stunned — none of them has ever seen a fish that big in his life. A craft note: notice one detail — Hemingway never lets the old man see his own defeat. He's asleep. He misses the whole crowd gathering in awe on the shore. When he wakes, it's Manolin's face waiting for him, not the skeleton. Letting the protagonist miss the most important scene is a far more sophisticated move than simply showing him staring at the empty boat and sighing.

Manolin's vow Manolin sits watch over the sleeping old man and cries. Through his tears he vows that no matter what his parents say, he is going back out to sea with Santiago. This is the gentlest cut in the whole book: a man who lost is picked back up out of the wreckage of his loss by a boy's tears and a boy's vow. The old man didn't lose his dignity, but dignity only means something if someone is there to witness it. Manolin is that witness. A craft note: Hemingway's use of the word cries is close to the most naked expression of emotion in the entire book. Through three days and three nights the old man never once cried, never once begged. By the end he is asleep, and it's someone else who cries. Handing the emotion over to a supporting character is the most sophisticated move in the whole book.