Hemingway's santiago as a symbol of endurance in the old man and the sea

Santiago is one of the most illustrative, metaphoric, consistent and consistent character among his works. Throughout The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago is given heroic proportions. He is “a strange old man” still powerful and still wise in all the ways of his trade. After he looks the great marlin, he fights him with epic skill and endurance, showing “what a man can do and what a man endures”. And when the sharks come, he is determined “to fight them until I die”, because he knows that “a man is not made for defeat…A man can be destroyed but not defeated”. Santiago comes to feel his deepest love for the creature that he himself hunts and kills, the great fish which he must catch not alone for physical need but even more for his pride and his profession. Beyond the heroic individualism of Santiago's struggle with the great fish and his fight against the sharks, however, and beyond the love and the brotherhood which he comes to feel for the noble creature he must kill, there is a further dimension in the old man's experience which gives to these their ultimate significance. The old man's realization of what he has done is reflected in his apologies to the fish, and this realization and its implications are emphasized symbolically throughout the novel.