Jaw Sea Man

990 Words4 Pages
“I believe that the common man is... a subject for tragedy” (Hemingway). In Jaws by Spielberg and The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway, both the characters of Jaws and Santiago, respectively, exhibit tragic flaws because they believe they can exert any kind of will over nature, which is a fallacy. There are many domains in which man finds himself on unequal footing with other creatures. The ocean, or any sea, epitomizes such an arena. Since at least biblical times, Western Civilization has occupied itself with brackish tales from the briny deep: Jonah and his terrible whale; Ahab and his Moby Dick; Perseus and his cruel kraken. The list is potentially limitless because the mystery surrounding man's interaction with such unknowable waters and their awful creatures is equally without limit. So, why even set…show more content…
Even far more impressive is the path the sea presents to many as an escape from the tedium of terrestrial life. The mystery of the sea presents a path for man to escape the monotony of human life. Potentially deadly trials and tribulations await any man who might live to tell his tale from dangerous encounters with the briny depths; there is no promise that he will simply escape unscathed. The mystery of the sea thus provides man a chance to flee his personal, never-ending human mystery. In The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago proves conscious of this fact. He states, “Now is the time to think of only one thing That which I was born for" (Hemingway 40). Santiago realizes that he was born to be a fisherman, and he has come to terms with his life’s meaning through the ocean he so loves. Furthermore, in Jaws, Chief Brody is afraid of the ocean overcomes his inner demons by force by killing the very beast fixated on killing him. “Y'know, I used to hate the water,” asserts Brody, who shows how drastically he had been changed by his encounter with the sea
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