Monday, April 29, 2013


Santiago always has a friend
The old man and the sea , By Ernest Hemingway , Published in 1980 ,A work of  Fiction .
"It is unsurpassed in Hemingway's oeuvre. Every word tells and there is not a word too many" -- Anthony Burgess . I honestly chose this quote because i couldn’t find any others on amazon.com that didn't sound complete and udderly boring and dorky although this just about does it . I feel like the review wasn’t clear at all , I kind of feel like he was quoting something but then again i could be wrong . I guess I agree with it , because this story doesn’t only tell a fiction but means something . It’s not just a pointless story , it tells of a man who’s old and doesn’t let age get in the way of his pride , and therefor he continues to fish and doesn’t give up even though hes aging and getting weak .
I honestly could related this book to a movie i watched called “Courageous” , and I chose this one because the meaning of the two stories are strong and both lead brave leaders . In the movie , there are like 4 or 5 men who are cops for a town that has a high level of crimes . They all have families and just wanna be good dads but life is kind of spiraling downhill . There was one man , who was pumping gas , and in the backseat was his daughter . He walked away for a quick minute and immediately a man jumped in the car and started driving . The dads first instinct was to grab the car and don’t let go in order to save his kid , so that’s what he did . And he never let go and eventually the cops noticed something fishy and took control over the situation . It reminded me of the man in the boat because he tried catching fish for a long time and never could , but finally he caught a merlin and when he was taking it back to his shed his merlin was attacked by sharks . The old man , Santiago automatically started fighting the fish and didn’t give up until the sharks were killed or backed down , but when got back to shore his merlin was nothing but bones from the attack . Although the man from the movie got his daughter back , and the old man from the book didn’t get to eat his fishy , it still kind of relates because they both put up a good fight to save what was theirs . The only thing different is the setting , the time period , the conflict in a way , and the characters . Oh and the story altogether .
The quote “A man can be defeated but not destroyed” basically to me means , that a MAN can go through so much and still be standing strong . He might be hurt , and let down and on the merge of giving up but no matter what he never gives up and always does what he needs to do , and that basically is what it is saying . Not just in my words but in general . I definitely agree with the quote all the way . It’s my dad’s life all the way . He gets knocked down on a constant everyday , deals with more than he should but never never gives up . On himself , and on his family . An example from a book would be Speak . She was raped and then labelled as a social outcast and was basically bullied until the very end of her freshman year when people found out what happened and gave her support . She stuck through the whole year and never gave up , and it payed off .
This book kind of relates to the time i did hurdles in the 2nd and 3rd grade at my school . I had practiced and practiced and always succeeded when i wasn’t actually competing and when i got ready to race i thought i was completely prepared . The first few hurdles i did fine , but the last one my foot caught on the top and i fell onto the ground hurting my ankle really bad . So I said okay better luck next year and trained again for it . Again , the first few hurdles were completely fine until i got the last hurdle and the same thing happened again . I got burned and knocked down (literally) but i still did it the year after that , and never gave up . I trained really hard and ended up coming in 2nd place . I ended up doing track for a few years after that but stopped in the 7th grade . So yeah , that’s how my story relates to the book , i never gave up and neither did Santiago .
I’d rate the book The old man and the sea a 3 paw for pursue it because it’s not really my type of book . I liked the way it was put together and the irony of it but other than that I didn’t think it was that great . The author is a good writer though , his book was kind of boring , and if i could change it up i’d change the whole storyline altogether but that’s just my opinion .