who is Di-Maggio?"The Old Man And the Sea"
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
The Function of Joe DiMaggio in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea
In the finale of Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 novella, The Old Man and the Sea, the titular
old man Santiago, who is “definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky,”
pulls onto the shore of his Cuban village with the scraps of the giant marlin that was to be the
savior of his fishing career and lies down to rest for, what is alluded to being, the final time (9).
This suggestion of the old man’s death is foreshadowed throughout the text as readers are given
glimpses of the wrecked state of the fisherman’s body early on in the story. He is described as:
thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches 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 and 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. (9-10)
The image being portrayed is not of a successful tradesman but, rather, that of someone who has
long been worn down by the demands of his society and his need to earn monetary funds in order
to survive. After going “eighty-four days” without catching a fish, it would seem that a change
in career would be the pertinent decision for Santiago as a means of preventing further physical
decline (9). But, Santiago is caught between two worlds: the U.S. economic and social