The Old Man and the Sea- read by Charlton Heston.

The Old Man and The Sea is one of my favorite books, certainly when it comes to Nautical Fiction. I have always loved it for the immense attention to detail- the reader gets to feel like they are truly with the fisherman Santiago for every single step of his journey in this book. I think that the journey- at least, the form it takes- is one of the more important things to look at when analyzing this book as part of the Nautical Fiction genre as well as incorporating the theme of creatures of the ocean. Santiago’s story is a fight against those creatures- there is always some underlying urgency, though there are many points where things come across as very calm. It has some high-action points, but they do not make up the majority of the fight. Nevertheless, that it what it is. There is a fight to catch fish, and then a fight to catch the fish, and then, much later, as the sharks eat away at its corpse, strapped alongside the boat, there is a fight to keep the fish. This story is always a fight both for and against the creatures of the ocean, somehow at the same time. The creatures are also portrayed with an interesting tone- there is still the seriousness that seems common in most genres, but terror never seemed to be a prevalent tone, at least to me. There is some urgency, with the fight to catch the giant fish, and before that, when Santiago needed to catch fish to eat, but overall the serious tone that The Old Man and the Sea gives ocean creatures is still different than the serious tones we see in other genres. There are definitely some moments in which there is a sense of being hunted- on the third day with the fish on the line, it circles the boat. This reminded me a lot of the theme of being hunted in horror movies about sharks, but at the same time, in The Old Man and the Sea that sense of being hunted never sets in, because things are still being told from the point of view of the fisherman, who is in control- he is the one doing the hunting here.

Nautical Fiction is a genre that focuses on a specific character’s or the general human relationship with the ocean and sea voyages. The setting is almost always on or near the ocean, and the theme usually focuses on masculinity, heroism, or the psychological struggles that come with the unwelcoming environment of a journey at sea.