The main character in the novel was the old man. Throughout the entire story, he was known to almost everyone as "the old man." That's a little embarrassing, to be defined by your age. Anyone wouldn't be a fan of that, and would probably do anything to give people a reason to call him something else. Being known as "the guy who caught that huge fish" would be way better than being called "old man." I believe that was one of the old man's motives for catching the huge fish. Now hold on, there was one character who called the old man by his real name, or Santiago. His friend, the boy (who just so happened to also not be called his real name) called him his real name like 3 times through out the story. I guess it's not polite to call one of your friends old. I believe that pride was another motive for the old man to catch the big fish. He was once a big time fisherman, and now people just laughed at him. He wanted to be remembered, or at least called by his own name once in a while. Hunger was not really a motive for the old man, and you would think that it would be a huge motive. I mean, everyone has to eat don't they? Actually, the old man really didn't eat much through out the entire novel. The only time he really ate, he ate some of the fish bait that caught the marlin. Isn't that kind of odd? A man eating fish bait and being caught by sickness and a fish eating fish bait and being caught by the old man? Hhmm...comparison? I think so. At the end of the novel, however, people still called him the old man. So did he fail? I don't think he failed. He didn't fail himself, and that was all that really mattered. Everyone else might not have known, but the old man knew himself.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. Print.
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