SOURCE: "Toward a 'Fifth Dimension' in The Old Man and the Sea," in The Centennial Review, Vol. XIX, No. 4, Fall, 1975, pp. 269-86.

In the following essay, Baskett provides a detailed analysis of the symbolic detail in The Old Man and the Sea—from biblical allusions to Santiago's aura of "strangeness" — which he says contributes to Hemingway's "fifth dimensional prose," or writing that "communicates the immediate experience of the perpetual now."

Although the protagonist of The Old Man and the Sea vows "to make a pilgrimage to the Virgen de Cobre if I catch [this fish],"¹ it is unlikely, since "In the night I spat something strange and felt something in my chest was broken" (p. 138), that he will live to keep his promise.² In a sense, however, Hemingway kept it for him, donating his Nobel Medal to the Shrine of our Lady of Charity of Cobre, Patron Saint...