The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

I am on the side that this was a profound autobiographical allegory. Hemingway was coming to the end of his life… he knew it… his mind not as sharp, his mind wild in all the wrong areas… His suicide 6 years later was a relief for him. His last great tale here. His repetition of “I wish the boy was here”… he was no longer the boy he once was; the big fish his last great adventure and having to go days/nights in order to catch it… the fight of his life; after getting the fish, finally, the sharks having their turns at eating the flesh of the great fish… the first kill of the first shark… the biggest he’d ever seen and “God knows that I have seen big ones. It was too good to last”; killing the fish for food, but also for pride because he was a fisherman, that’s what he was… and the love for the fish before and after it’s death; him laying in bed afterwards, the fish having been eaten by the sharks, nothing left but his spine, head, tail… “And what beat you, he thought. Nothing, he said aloud, I went out too far.” An adventure/s is extension of the self, of going too far… to see what will happen, the resolve not to be defeated… and then if so to know why and be fine with it, and learn from it...just as the old man and the boy’s conversation on what needed to be done to get it right. Hemingway got it right.