hero of The Old Man and the Sea

In the book, 'The Old Man and the Sea', the hero was Santiago, the old man. The hero of a book is usually someone who accomplishes something really great or someone who saves the day. In the book 'The Old Man and the Sea', however, the hero is an old man who goes out to the ocean everyday in hopes of catching a fish. I think the old man is the hero in this book because he is the main character. He could be considered the hero because he does something that the other fishermen dream of doing. He catches an eighteen foot long marlin. This is heroic because the old man does it all by himself and without the help of the young boy that he usually has to fall back on. The old man is much weaker than the fish. The fish is physically stronger and much larger than the old man so the odds are really stacked against the old man killing the fish. The only thing that the old man has against the fish is that he is more determined than the fish to beat it and that he is more wise than the fish. The fish does not know what is happening or how to beat the old man. The old man has been fishing for years so he has a lot of experience, although not with any fish as big as the one he is battling against now. The old man is a hero because he overcomes so many obstacles to catch the fish. He gets a lot of injuries while he is catching it. He has to work with many cuts and scrapes and he has to try to hold on to the line when one of his hands has become so badly cramped that he can not use it. The old man loses a lot of his strength holding on to the rope, so that when the fish is close enough to kill it, he barely has any strength left. He has to overcome a lot of obstacles even after he finally kills the fish too. He has to fight off sharks that try to eat the meat of the marlin and he has to try not to go insane while he is returning to shore after being dragged for so long. I believe that the old man is the hero of the book because he did what most fishermen would call impossible and he had to overcome many difficult obstacles.

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