On The Surviving Logics In The Old Man And The Sea

The Old Man and the Sea is one of the most famous works written by the outstanding American writer Earnest Hemingway in the twentieth century, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in1954. Ecocriticism was introduced into the studies of Hemingway and The Old Man and the Sea around the1990s, providing a new view for reading this book. In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway expresses a deep ecological concern through the description of the old fisherman Santiago’s attitude towards life and his relationship with the sea as well as nature. This thesis is to make an eco-critical reading of The Old Man and the Sea, to analyze the relationships between human and nature, human and society. By examining the details, the thesis tends to examine the way human beings live in the modern society and how they can live with nature harmoniously.The paper will be divided into three chapters besides the introduction and the conclusion. The introduction includes the literature review on Ecocriticism as well as the novel The Old Man and the Sea. The second chapter deals with the relationship between Santiago and the sea, or in other words, human beings and nature. The third chapter mainly talks about the relationship between Santiago and the sea creatures, or in other words, human beings and creatures. The last chapter focuses on the existential alienation, or the so-called eco-philosophy, and then it tries to propose one of the solutions for this alienation. The paper has two motivations to examine the ecological thoughts in The Old Man and the Sea. Firstly, it is meant to show Hemingway’s ecological considerations of modern people’s surviving logics. Secondly, it also makes a point of examining the balance between ecocentrism and anthropocentricism in The Old Man and the Sea.