Santiago Vs Hemingway

Old Man and the Sea Comparison In Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, the main character, Santiago, articulates his opinions on success and failure. Santiago continues to persevere through the pain and suffering to try and conquer his environment, the surrounding animals, and his own mind and body. In Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, we see Jon idolizes his guide, Rob Hall. As he tells Hall’s story, he explains how Hall gave up expeditions for the sake of exploring because he could not continue to out do himself. Between the two texts we see a few commonalities. In both there is the image of idolizing a hero like character, the idea of persevering in the pursuit of legacy, and the idealized process of continuing to take things to a higher level

Santiago feels, “guilt and angst over having ‘gone out too far’ only to lose everything” (Cools and Stephens 89). Santiago only sees things as a success or failure, so when he returns with just a skeleton, he does not see himself as a hero worthy of Manolin’s admiration. He accomplishes the goal which he sets out to do by catching and killing the biggest fish he has ever seen, but because he can not control the elements around him, he sees it as a failure. Audience members outside of the storyline can separate the adventure into the goals remembering that making our, “vision finer does not mean making it less heroic”(Cools and Stephens 89). If Santiago were to consider and fine tune the experience into what he is specifically determined to accomplish, he would see that his actions were nothing but heroic and marvelous. According to “Out Too Far,” Santiago needs to widen his view of success and failure to lessen the burden he places on his own shoulders (Cools and Sanders 89). Krakauer reiterates this in the recalling of Hall’s journey. Krakauer idolizes Hall as we can tell from his descriptions, explanations, and retelling of Hall’s experiences. He explains how Hall, and his partner Gary Ball, “decided to switch direction and get into high-altitude guiding” (Krakauer 35). According to one of Hall’s partners, Bill Atkinson, in order to be a professional climber long-term, the climber has to make each climb more advanced and dangerous to continue to receive funding from sponsors (Krakauer 35). Hall re-defining his views of success allows him to remove some of the pressures placed on his shoulders to be successful and support his family. Both hero figures in the two texts, Santiago and Hall, have intense pressures placed on them by those who idolize them. The difference between the two figures is that Hall abandons his