Great Gatsby-Santiago

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Santiago is an old fisherman who lives in a small coast town in Cuba. At the time that Hemingway wrote the story, he was also an elderly gentlemen and was such an avid fisherman throughout his life, that books such as "Ernest Hemingway, The Angler As Artist" were written on the sole subject of how this obsession influenced Hemingway's writing. Furthermore, he fished off the coast of Cuba so much that he decided to "buy the 'Finca Vigia' in Cuba, a substantial estate located about fifteen miles from downtown Havana . . ." For entertainment Santiago would "read the baseball." Meanwhile Hemingway often "relied on baseball analogies" in his writing, suggesting that he also loved the game. These similarities between Santiago's lifestyle and Hemingway's cannot be ignored or passed off as coincidence because they are much too precise. Already, from these prominent identical traits it is evident that Hemingway modeled the character of Santiago after his own person.

Hemingway had a very characteristic view of life. He believed it was admirable to risk one's life in order to test one's limits. His love of bullfighting clearly demonstrated this. Raymond S. Nelson, Hemingway scholar, states, "He saw bullfighting as tragic ritual, and he lionized the better bullfighters as men who risked death every time they entered the arena -- a stance he admired and chose for himself in other ways." One example of Hemingway choosing this stance for himself was when "he shot and dropped a charging Cape buffalo a few feet before the enraged animal would have killed him." This daring act of Hemingway's sounds peculiarly similar to the sport of bullfighting, and is an excellent example of...
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