Conflict of The Old Man and the Sea

In the book, 'The Old Man and the Sea' the old man has to deal with many conflicts. He has to deal with the young boy not being with him anymore, he has to deal with his own unluckiness for eighty four days and then when he finally caught a fish, he couldn't even lift it into his boat. Despite all these problems, the old man remained optimistic.

I think the main conflict of this book happens when the old man catches the big fish. He gets all excited that he finally got his big catch, but it turned out that the fish was so big and the old man was so weak, that he could not lift the fish into the boat.

When the old man first caught the fish, he was afraid that if he tried to pull it in, the line would break and the fish would escape. He had worked so hard that he could not take any chances of losing the fish. The fish continued dragging on the line and he drags the old man and his boat out away from the lang farther and farther. The old man is worried that the fish will keep going deeper down into the water, making it more difficult to drag him into the boat. The fish pulled the boat all night, and the next day, the fish was still pulling. At one point, the fish pulled sharply on the line, which cut into the old man's hands. This cut made it even more difficult for the old man to hold onto the line.

The old man began to lose his strength while holding onto the line, and he decides that he needs to eat something. He cut up the fish that he caught the day before with his uncut hand. He was holding the line only with his cut hand, when it cramped up turning into a claw. This frustrates the old man very much because he knows that he needs his hand to catch this fish.

Finally, the old man's luck begins to turn when the fish jumps out of the water. This is good news for the old man because it means that the fish's air sacs are filled with air, preventing it from going too deep into the water.

The conflict of the story worsens when the fish jumps out of the water for a second time. The old mans hands become more and more badly cut and he falls face first into the meat of a dolphin that he had caught. He fears that the smell of the dolphin meat will make him nauseous and cause him to lose his strength.

Later that day, the fish started to circle the boat, getting closer and closer with each circle. Eventually the fish is close enough and the old man killed it with a harpoon. He tried to lift the fish into the boat, but it was too large and too heavy. The old man quickly tried to return home, but the fish drag him very far away from the land. The trip home is very long and the fish is bleeding into the water, attracting sharks. When the first shark appeared, the old man was ready. The shark got a bite of the fish, but the old man killed it before it could get a second bite. He lost his harpoon in the battle with the shark. The bite from the shark made more blood spill out from the fish, attracting more sharks. The sharks eat most of the fish and by the time the old man returned, all that was left of the fish was the skeleton.

The main conflict of the story was all the events that prevented the old man from returning home with his awesome catch. These events were very frustrating for the old man and they could have probably been avoided if he had the boy with him.

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