The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway — Deep Reader: The Returning Lions
Reading Note: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
This essay discusses the novella in full, including its ending.
When someone we love comes home exhausted, we may begin making plans before they feel able to imagine a future, talking about things to replace and work to do together. These small preparations assume their presence, and the talk can sound almost careless beside what has happened, even as it gives the tired person a place in tomorrow.
Near the close of The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago returns with the remains of the marlin the sharks have eaten. Manolin, the boy he taught to fish, insists that they will fish together again, turning their conversation toward future work before the book leaves its old fisherman asleep, dreaming of lions. The effect holds sadness and consolation together, and much of its force comes from our having encountered those lions before.
I count this among Hemingway’s best novels, with a last sentence whose economy recalls the short stories in which earlier details continue working after the narrative stops. We recognize the image immediately; everything Santiago has endured changes how we receive it. That combination of recognition and altered feeling is an achievement worth staying with, especially in a book whose apparent simplicity can make its construction easy to overlook.
The lions before the ordeal
The first dream gives the lions an unexpected manner: they play like young cats, and Santiago loves them as he loves the boy. A familiar emblem of strength becomes an object of affection. Reading that comparison closely, we meet a man whose pleasure in powerful creatures includes their playfulness and whose remembered youth remains accessible through tenderness.
Alongside the courage and vitality lions can suggest, the verbs establish a more particular relation: Santiago watches and loves, bringing us close to the part of him capable of delight in something he has no need to capture. A purely heroic reading would have to account for that pleasure in looking, and for the playfulness Hemingway gives the animals.
The dream is also framed by an inventory of things he has ceased to dream about, including great fish and contests of strength. Hemingway gives the surviving image a history of selection: much of Santiago’s earlier life has fallen out of his dreams, while this beach and its animals continue to recur. Their persistence feels personal because the narration places them among remembered possibilities that no longer return.
An old man’s dream life seems to have gathered around a few beloved places, and that narrowing can make us sad even as he takes pleasure in what survives. The lions play; the scene retains an activity independent of his present loneliness. Remembered youth can become painful when it chiefly measures the distance from the life one now has, but Santiago still enjoys looking at these animals. His dreams preserve that enjoyment across the years separating him from the boy who saw them.
Hemingway connects the animals to Manolin through affection while keeping their appearances distinct: Santiago does not dream about the boy. That small separation gives the comparison room to work. We can feel a relation between youthful life on the beach and youthful life beside him without making either figure a disguised version of the other. The image remains populated by animals he once saw, and the boy remains someone with his own voice and decisions.
A recurring dream inside the struggle
At sea, Santiago wishes for sleep and the lions; when they eventually appear in a dream, he watches them come onto the beach and waits for more, happy. The recurrence interrupts the work of enduring, letting attention so often occupied by the next necessary action dwell on a sight he welcomes.
The difference between those kinds of attention helps explain the dream’s emotional value. Fishing demands judgment under pressure: the body must be managed, strength conserved, each action adjusted to what the fish does. Dreaming briefly gives Santiago a scene whose continuation asks only that he watch. Waiting for more lions contains expectation without the immediate burden of deciding what to do about them.
The fish continues pulling while Santiago sleeps, so the narration holds two kinds of movement together: the lions approaching along the remembered beach and the boat being drawn through the sea. Pleasure occupies his dreaming attention while the dangerous voyage continues around his body. Keeping both movements in view makes us feel how precariously he rests.
The lions arrive only after two other dreams. First Santiago sees porpoises mating, then finds himself in his village bed, cold, with his right arm asleep beneath his head. The remembered beach follows, and he watches from the bow of an anchored ship, waiting happily for more lions. When he wakes, his fist strikes his face and the line burns his hands. The cold, numb arm has appeared inside a dream before the awakening brings us back to his body under strain. Hemingway lets sleep move through different kinds of experience before reaching the pleasure Santiago wished for; the abrupt return to the line then shows how little time that pleasure can secure for him.
When the lions appear for the last time, we have already experienced the dream’s temporary relief and watched waking life resume its demands. Those earlier transitions give the consolation an emotional history: the familiar pleasure has survived other interruptions, and its return belongs to a rhythm we have followed through the voyage.
Manolin gives the ending a tomorrow
Before the last dream, the dialogue between Santiago and Manolin changes the conditions in which we will encounter it. After so much speech directed toward himself and the sea, Santiago has someone who answers, whose wishes can alter what happens next. Instruction, response, objection, and insistence make their conversation a shared activity with consequences for both of them.
The boy’s promise to fish together has a special force because his affection precedes the voyage. We have no need to imagine that Santiago’s suffering has finally earned his love. What develops at the close is the boy’s determination to put that attachment into a shared working life. Their future becomes something he can actively propose.
When Santiago explains how to make a new lance from a car spring, the conversation preserves his ability to teach through something Manolin can use. The boy needs his knowledge while the old man needs care, and their exchange accommodates both needs. Santiago can contribute to the preparations even while his body requires rest.
Because their plans concern equipment and work, the hope has a scale we can imagine: two people preparing to do something they know how to do. Santiago’s condition leaves those intentions vulnerable, and the book stops before we can learn whether they will fish together again. Still, the dialogue lets us hear the possibility taking practical shape between them.
The vulnerability gives their conversation its warmth. Manolin speaks toward a future while the suffering remains present. We hear how companionship can begin doing useful work before anyone knows the outcome. His insistence also prepares a quiet change in the closing scene: Santiago can sleep with someone beside him. The dream remains private, but the sleeper’s circumstances have changed.
Why the final lions carry both feelings
Hemingway ends with three plain statements: Santiago is sleeping, the boy is watching him, and he is dreaming about the lions. The movement takes us from bodily rest through another person’s attention into an experience that only the narration can disclose. Each statement gives us a different kind of access to the same man.
The last statement takes us beyond what Manolin can know by watching, maintaining the intimacy with Santiago’s inner life that the voyage has established. After following so much of his inward speech, we receive this final experience while he rests, released for the moment from having to direct his own actions or keep himself going.
The final sentence supplies no fresh description of the animals, trusting our memory through its definite reference to the lions. We bring back the beach, the playfulness, the earlier happiness; the image’s brevity makes the reader participate in its return. Hemingway leaves room for that recollection by ending before any further description or explanation can tell us how to feel about it.
Having accompanied Santiago through real loss, we encounter the familiar dream with knowledge that changes its emotional force. Their return permits consolation because a beloved inward experience is still available to him; the sadness remains because its availability repairs neither his body nor the outcome of the voyage. The novella can end here because the image carries both feelings without a further judgment declaring how they should be reconciled.
After the first dream, Santiago wakes and goes to fetch the boy. At the close, the boy is already beside him, watching while he sleeps. Their changed positions give the familiar inward pleasure somewhere gentler to return, even as we remember what has made the rest necessary.
For Hemingway’s handling of grief and emotional distance, continue with Islands in the Stream.
Sources
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), digital transcription. Particular attention to the recurring lions dreams and the closing conversation with Manolin.
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