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Originally Posted by issybird
I delayed a bit on posting to see if anyone else shared my reaction and then was busy. But I'm caught up now and see no one's weighed in yet.
What struck me most was that this is a sustained and quite powerful Christian allegory, although somewhat flawed. From the start, there's a fisherman named Santiago. James, son of Zebedee, was one of the fishermen called by Christ to be an apostle and the first to be martyred. And then Manolin, a diminutive of Manuel/Emmanuel, was the source of abiding love and endless succor.
The language of the book is replete with religious symbolism, affirmations of faith and hope and love, references to relics, Christ as a fisher of men and fish as a symbol of Christianity, the number of people to be fed by the marlin, the vow of a pilgrimage to the Virgen de Cobre, Our Lady of Charity, thus invoking the pilgrimage of St. James, and I could go on. Hemingway converted to Catholicism when he married his second wife and while it's dubious he was ever a practicing Catholic, the motifs of the religion pervade several of his novels.
The depth provided by this allegory in conjunction with the evocations of the emotions experienced by Santiago and the heart-pounding physicality of the catch made this unputdownable for me. I read this decades ago when it was clearly over my head; it's on my ten best list for this year.
I did think Hemingway's metaphors got a bit confused toward the end, when Santiago is more of a Christ figure, carrying his mast like a cross to his shack and then lying as if crucified, hands with their stigmata palms up. Ultimately, I'm not sure what Hemingway was driving at with this shift unless I read it wrong from the start, although the names seem pretty indicative to me.
There is an unintended symmetry between Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises and his last in his lifetime, The Old Man. A significant portion of Sun was set along the ancient pilgrimage trail to Santiago de Compostela, where St. James's body is supposed to have ended up after floating from Israel where he was martyred, and the names of the protagonists in both books, Jake Barnes and Santiago, are variants of James.
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I can see the symbolism that elevates Santiago to a Christ-figure, and read a little bit about that in some online guides I looked at before reading the book, but I don't know what to do with it.
I didn't catch anything about the names--I barely registered what the characters' names were since they're used only a few times each. If we disregard your point about the name meanings, the boy seems to be not the Christ-figure but the devoted disciple throughout.
But the fish. What do you do with the killing of the fish? The fish has traditionally been the symbol of Christianity, and it's the thing the apparent Christ-figure here kills. How does that compute?
One could probably make a case for the marlin being a symbol of Christ and the old man being a symbol of Pilate/Romans putting him to death (and remember Santiago's dreams of lions--and how Romans supposedly threw Christians to the lions). The days-long journey of the marlin before it was killed could echo the time between Christ's entry into Jerusalem and execution. The harpoon in the marlin could symbolize the spear in Christ's side.
There are other things that bug me about the old man as a Christ-figure, one being his age. Another is his motive--you mention how many people will be fed by the marlin, but he thinks first about how much money he will make from selling it; he's not going to provide fish for the poor. It's not an ignoble motive for this poor guy to think about the money, but neither is it a selfless, Christ-like motive.
Whatever the symbolism, I still don't have a clue what the sharks and Joe DiMaggio represent.