This study will examine John Steinbeck's story "Flight" and Ernest Hemingway's novel The Old Man and the Sea in terms of the applicability of the Luther Standing Bear quotation, "Only solitude brings wisdom." Both stories focus on the role of nature in the characters' acquisition of wisdom. For the purposes of clarity, "solitude" will refer to an individual human being's isolation from other human beings in a natural environment, and "wisdom" will refer to an individual's evolution into a state of greater awareness of what life and death are for a human being by himself in harrowing circumstances.
Santiago, the old man in Hemingway's story is on the sea by himself by choice. He is a fisherman and his story tells of his moving more deeply into wisdom as he struggles in life and death with a great fish far at sea in solitude, and then with the sharks which attack the great fish once he has killed it and tied it to his boat. His story is one of wisdom in defeat.
Pepe in Steinbeck's story finds wisdom as he moves from boyhood to manhood out of necessity, out of the need of survival. Like the old man Santiago, the young man Pepe is alone in the wilderness. Both, in different contexts, are fighting for their lives against foes which would kill them if they could. The intensity and danger of the two characters' experiences alone in nature are the forces which bring the two to a higher state of wisdom, a high state of life, self-awareness, and knowledge of, if not victory over, death itself.
One difference between the two is that Pepe's final action--facing death by gunfire to remain "free"--makes him seem a mythical rather than a "real" human character, whereas the humility expressed by Santiago in defeat makes him seem much more human and accessible to the reader. 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 s...