Around the world, people try to find the job that they are content with doing for the rest of their life. People often change jobs many times before they actually find that job. In Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, the old man found his job that he was happy doing for the rest of his life. That job was being a fisherman. The old man was content with all of the highs and lows that the job offered him. In The Old Man and the Sea, the old man serves as an archetypal Hero throughout the book and experiences a daunting and life threatening task to catch a fish and end an 84 day drought.
To begin with, the old man possesses all the necessary qualities to be characterized as the Hero. During the 84 day drought in which he went without a fish, he was still confident in his abilities and wouldn’t give up. He even took the chance of going farther out into sea than any other boat dared. Hemingway wrote, “the sun rose thinly from the sea and the old man could see the other boats, low on the water and well in toward the shore, spread out across the current” (32). The old man was not scared of going out farther into the sea if it meant the possibility of catching a fish and ending his drought. Another time in the novel that the old man showed the properties of hero is when he hooked an enormous marlin and wouldn’t give up, even if it killed him. On page 92, the old man thinks to himself, “you are killing me, fish…” (Hemingway). The old man is showing his resolve to catch the