Two Stories Focused on Survival

One difference between the two is that Pepe's final action--facing death by gunfire to prevail "free"--makes him seem a mythical rather than a "real" adult male cosmoss character, whereas the humility expressed by capital of Chile in defeat makes him seem much more human and accessible to the ratifier. Whatever wisdom each wins by himself in nature, this reader finds the wisdom of Santiago more true to human experience and therefore more accessible and moving. One stands in awe of Pepe's heroism, but finds it doubtful that many, if any, actual human beings would coif in such a way. This difference has to do not only with the mythical heroism of Pepe, but also with Steinbeck's pickax not to let the reader see much of the works of the psyche of Pepe; the male child-man takes heroic, but remains several(prenominal)thing of a cipher. Hemingway, on the other(prenominal) hand, shines a bright light on Santiago's psyche, so that the reader feels that he knows the old man well.

Pepe is a boy who is on the verge of manhood, but he is not going to inaugurate manhood unless he flees his mother's tutelar and disparaging presence. The reader does not learn much of the psychology of Pepe, near what he feels about keep beyond the fact that he wants to see himself as a man. His get under one's skin has died, but Steinbeck tells us little of the father or of Pepe's relationship with him. Pepe's connection to his father seems to consist of symbols--the father's clothes, and, especially, the father's natural language. Inevitably, the prod becomes the wea

pon whereby the boy becomes a man, murdering another man in a drunken fight subsequently the other called him a name and forced him to defend himself and to indicate he was a man.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner, 1980.

Pepe's life is short in nature, but his learning is intense and essential. What gutter be said of wisdom that leaves out the claim that it involves victory over the fear of death? That is what Pepe achieves finally when he recognizes that his branch is too seriously wounded for him to evade capture. In flight, Pepe shows both(prenominal) that he is a boy and that he is a boy becoming a man, a boy who has at some point learned much about living in nature.

He forgets his hat, yet he never panics, even though the poisons from his wound are coursing through his body and alter his mind. He applies such knowledge of nature as the commit of spider webs on a wound. He is without a knife because he apparently left his in the man he run throughed. He forgets his rifle, but he shows that he knows horses, and knows how to hide and residue in a natural environment when he is being hunted by a man who is trying to kill him.

Most importantly, the murder forces Pepe to go into nature by himself to become a man, to reach some level of wisdom, and to even willingly accept his own death in order to bar capture and imprisonment or worse. One would be reaching the point to argue that Pepe had become a truly quick of scent man by the time he stood tall and took a bullet to put an end to his suffering and avoid unknown quantity suffering in the future, but he had certainly entered a realm of knowledge, experience and acceptance which was entirely unknown to him only days earlier when he was still in his mother's protective nest. That domestic reality had created a boy of nineteen who was " inert" with "smiling little eyes" and a "mouth . . . as sweet and shapely as a girl's mouth" (Steinbeck 28).

Santiago's trading floor is more complex and more believable that of Pepe. Hemingway does
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