Old Man and the Sea- Irony

In the novel, The Old Man and the Sea, the main character Santiago has gone eighty four days without catching a single fish. The old man is very optimistic about catching a fish and trying to make everyday better. Then one day the old man goes out to sea and catches this huge marlin that is eighteen feet long! Because of the massive size of the fish, it will not fit into the old man's little boat so he has to leave it tied to the side and let it drag beside the boat. On the way back home, the huge marlin is eaten by sharks until all that is left is a skeleton of what once was a beautiful fish. This is ironic because the old man has had such bad luck with fishing recently, then he hooks the biggest fish of his career and it gets eaten by sharks. I felt really bad for the old man after his prize fish gets eaten, because everything he just worked for is gone. I know how the old man felt after his fish got eaten because when I was working on one of these blogs, it deleted before I got to post it and all of my hard work was for nothing. Another thing that I found ironic about this novel was that when he returned to shore after the three day struggle, tourists saw the skeleton and thought it was the skeleton of a shark. I thought this was ironic because it was the sharks that ate this fish down to its bones, and then people thought that it was a shark. If the sharks had not eaten it down to its bones, people would have been able to tell that it was a marlin. This book contains a lot of irony, and I think it made the book seem more realistic because many books have a perfect ending, but in real life you do not always have a happy ending.

Bibliography

Hemmingway, Ernest. Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner. 1996. Print.