OMATS Essay Final Draft

Old Man and the Sea Essay Assignment

The setting of stories is critical to the plot, plot events, action, and what happens in the story. In this story, The Old Man and the Sea it takes place in the Gulf of Mexico and Cuba around the 1940’s or 50’s. The main character is a serene old man Santiago who is a fisherman struggling to make a living because he hasn’t caught anything in a long time but is optimistic and not for a second does he think he will not catch a fish. In the end he catches a marlin on his way back home to bring it in a shark eats his marlin. In this story the setting influenced the plot and the action of the abstract story heavily.
The story takes place in Cuba in the mid 1900’s. Just this alone heavily affects the story. Because he’s fishing in warmer waters the type of fish he catches would have been different if he were fishing in the north. He would have never caught a marlin in the first place. If he had lived in a more recent time he would have more advanced gear to fish with and maybe some different methods. Santiago is also worn by the sea and it affects the tone of the story and how it’s told. Pg. 10 “The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks.” That quote shows how the harsh sea and the weather affect him.
If he didn’t live in an area where the economy was based so much on fishing and people working to survive he maybe would have been able to succeed more and maybe fish would have been worth more. Since he lives in Cuba where the economy is mainly based on fishing he struggles to survive. Pg. “The successful fisherman of that day were already in and had butchered their marlin out…” This quote shows that fishing is big and there are a lot of successful fishermen and it means that he’s the one who’s not successful. He is the unsuccessful one because he lives in an economy where there is a lot of fishing competition. The author uses a precise location for the story to take place to form the plot.
Because Santiago was out at sea for most of the story the plot seemed to not progress that much until the end where the setting help to form the end of the story because the sharks ate the marlin, and that would not have happened in Maine, so the setting is important. For the whole middle part you see that the old man is very lonely because he is alone with the sea who is his only friend. Pg. 16 “once there had been a tinted photograph of his wife on the wall but he had taken it down because it had made him too lonely to see it.” This proves that he is very lonely because he has no one to relate or talk to and being at sea most of the time doesn’t help his cause, instead it makes it worse because now he talks to himself all the time. Also if Cuba had a better economy he would have been able to make more money. Instead because there is so much competition in the market he is not able to succeed and doesn’t catch any fish.
The story would have been much different if this story took place somewhere different than Cuba and the Gulf of Mexico. Because there is only one character and you don’t get to know him that well you feel detached from the character for the whole story. The story had very complex and descriptive details but because it took place in Cuba and in the Gulf of Mexico, and mainly at sea, the plot and the action seemed to drag on and it had a tough time progressing until the end which is tense.