Steinbeck's "Flight" & Hemingway's Old Man & The Sea

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, de

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is mother in her house, with no father to teach him to be a man, he will remain a boy. When he kills a man, he has no choice and must go into nature to survive. Pepe's life is short in nature, but his learning is intense and essential. What can be said of wisdom that leaves out the claim that it involves victory over the fear of death? That is what Pepe achieves finally when he recognizes that his arm is too seriously wounded for him to evade capture. In flight, Pepe shows both that he is a boy and that he is a boy becoming a man, a boy who has at some point learned much about living in nature. He forgets his hat, yet he never panics, even though the poisons from his wound are coursing through his body and affecting his mind. He applies such knowledge of nature as the use of spider webs on a wound. He is without a knife because he apparently left his in the man he killed. He forgets his rifle, but he shows that he knows horses, and knows how to hide and sleep in a natural environment when he is being hunted by a man who is trying to kill him. In short, the reader finds Pepe a child in the beginning of the story. He is then thrust into the harsh realm of manhood when he kills a man with his father's knife in a drunken fight, defe

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