Cause, Gains, and losses- The Old Man and The Sea

In every story there is a conflict. The conflict is what makes a story interesting. The conflict is the challenge that the character or characters must overcome in the book. Each conflict also must have a cause, gains, and losses. In the story, 'The Old Man and The Sea', the conflict is the struggle between the old man and his giant catch; an eighteen foot long marlin. The old man fights with the huge fish for three days before he finally kills it. The cause of this conflict is that the fish is too great for the old man to kill quickly and easily as he normally would. He does not have enough strength to reel in such a big fish and therefore, he has to struggle with and fight with the fish for three torturous days before finally getting him close enough to kill. This conflict makes the story more interesting because the reader is hoping for the old man to catch a break and be able to catch the fish. The conflict of this book does not really have very many gains to it, other than the experience that the old man gained from fighting with this fish. Another gain from the conflict is that after he struggled with the fish and caught it and the young boy saw the size of the fish, he was able to fish with the old man again. The losses of the conflict of this book are that the old man loses a lot of his strength in his fight for this fish. He is so concentrated on catching the fish that he comes very close to dying himself. He is willing to do anything to catch the fish because he had not caught any fish in such a long time. Another loss of the conflict is that because the old man could not pull the fish in the boat after he killed it, the sharks smelled the blood of the marlin and ate its whole carcass. This left the old man with only the skeleton of the fish and no meat to sell from it.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. Print.