The Christianity Issues in ‘The Old Man And The Sea’
The Old Man and the Sea looks like a Christian illustration from multiple points of view. Its hero, the angler Santiago, appears epitomize Christian temperances, and the story plainly and more than once interfaces his preliminaries adrift to Christ’s misery on the cross. Notwithstanding, a cautious examination of Santiago’s character and activities demonstrates that he is certainly not a Christian character and that, in all actuality, he typifies a warrior ethic that is contrary with Christian standards. The parallels between The Old Man and the Sea and the commonplace Biblical story of the execution add account and enthusiastic capacity to the novel, however Hemingway does not utilize them to propel a religious good or exercise. Rather, they serve to propel Santiago’s warrior logic. In spite of the fact that The Old Man and the Sea has shallow Christian components, at its center it can’t be viewed as a Christian novel.
At first, Santiago is by all accounts a perfect Christian. He keeps Christian symbols in his home, he alludes to God and Christ more than once, and Hemingway points out his “confidence,” “expectation,” and “love”— the three essential Christian ideals. Be that as it may, these appearances are shallow. For instance, however Santiago says he has “confidence,” he doesn’t utilize the word in a religious sense; rather, he utilizes it regarding a superstitious thought of fortunes and to depict his emotions about baseball. When he supplicates amid his fight with the fish, he introduces his petitions by saying he isn’t religious and afterward continues to discuss them mechanically, overlooking the words. Santiago’s watchful and trained way to deal with everything in life is stressed all through the novel, so his messiness here just attracts regard for his absence of duty to his petitions. Significantly more vital, Santiago never considers God. Rather, he discovers solace, quality, and importance by considering mainstream things: the human world, baseball, and the animals of the ocean—not religion.
Santiago isn’t religious, yet he does live by an ethical code and has a rationality of life. He is an ace of his specialty, considerably more mindful to its fine points of interest than the other angler in his town are. He represents the masculine ideals of mettle and assurance. What’s more, he has a solid feeling of good and bad with regards to slaughtering. He adores and regards the fish he seeks after, thinking of them as his “siblings,” and he loathes executing an animal for no great reason. More than whatever else, Santiago has a continuing pride, which he communicates most obviously at the times he understands that more sharks are coming to eat the immense marlin he has gotten. He says, “A man can be wrecked however not crushed”— that is, a genuine man will battle in any case, to death if necessary, yet he will never surrender. Together, these standards shape a furiously autonomous warrior’s theory of life, where living admirably is tied in with meeting foes in fair fight. This is certifiably not a Christian point of view, which would advocate a patient restraint and a docile resistance of hardship.
Amusingly, Hemingway utilizes Christian imagery to propel this substitute perspective. After Santiago has snared the considerable marlin, he passes the angling line over his back and holds it in the two hands, cutting his palms more than once. This stance takes after that of Christ on the cross, and Santiago’s injuries summon the stigmata, the cut injuries Christ bore from the execution. Be that as it may, toward the finish of his misery, Santiago isn’t recovered or renewed like Christ. Or maybe, his fish is stolen from him by sharks, and he comes back to arrive near death. His anguish must be viewed as redemptive on the grounds that, in Santiago’s view, battle and avoidance are closes in themselves. In the novel’s rationality, we are our best and most genuine selves just in a demise battle. This message is best outlined in Hemingway’s depiction of the plain snapshot of the fish’s demise: “At that point the fish woke up, with his passing in him, and rose high out of the water demonstrating all his incredible length and width and all his capacity and his excellence.” Only in death does the fish come totally alive, or is its significance altogether obvious.
In a Christian story, a profound religious message may be imparted through the activities of a conventional man. In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway turns this scholarly tradition on end. Rather, he appropriates the intense, thunderous story of Christ’s execution keeping in mind the end goal to pass on and laud the existence logic of a normal man.
