religious pictures

In the one-room shack made of guano palm budshields, on the brown walls of flattened, overlapping leaves, hang two religious pictures: a color print of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and another of the Virgin of Cobre. These are relics of Santiago's wife, who is dead. Once a tinted photograph of her also hung on the wall, but he took it down because it made him too lonely to see it; it now lies on a shelf in the corner under his clean shirt. The pictures thus mark both the presence of a lost domestic life and the deliberate suppression of its most painful reminder. They are the only decorations in a room furnished with a bed, a table, one chair, and a place on the dirt floor to cook with charcoal—a space of extreme material poverty where the sacred images stand out as objects of enduring value.

Prayer and the Moral Struggle

Santiago is not a conventionally religious man—"I am not religious," he says aloud during his ordeal—yet he turns to the Virgin of Cobre in a moment of desperate need. After his left hand uncramps at noon on the second day, he promises to make a pilgrimage to the Virgin of Cobre if he catches the fish, and he begins to recite ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys mechanically, sometimes so tired that he cannot remember the prayer and must say it fast so that it comes automatically. He adds a personal petition: "Blessed Virgin, pray for the death of this fish. Wonderful though he is." The prayer does not ease his physical suffering—he feels "suffering exactly as much, and perhaps a little more"—but it gives him a structure for his will. The religious pictures thus become the focal point of a bargain struck between an old man and the divine, a transaction that acknowledges the fish's wonder even as it asks for its death.

The Lions and the Dream of Africa

Santiago's dreams offer a counterpoint to the religious images. He no longer dreams of storms, women, great fish, fights, or his wife; he dreams only of places and of the lions on the beach. The lions play like young cats in the dusk, and he loves them as he loves the boy. The Sacred Heart and the Virgin remain on the wall, but in sleep Santiago returns to a pre-Christian, elemental landscape—the long golden beaches of Africa, the white beaches that hurt the eyes, the high capes and great brown mountains. The lions are not symbols of a creed but of a vitality that exists before and beyond institutional faith. Yet the two realms are not opposed: the religious pictures are relics of his wife, and the lions are the main thing left in his dreaming mind. Both connect him to what he has lost—love, youth, a shared life—and both sustain him.

The Fish as Brother and the Question of Sin

After killing the marlin and watching the sharks destroy it, Santiago's thoughts turn to sin. He wonders whether it was a sin to kill the fish, even though he did it to keep himself alive and to feed many people. He reflects that San Pedro was a fisherman, as was the father of the great DiMaggio, and that he was born to be a fisherman as the fish was born to be a fish. The religious pictures on his wall are silent witnesses to this moral reckoning. He concludes that he killed the fish not only to live and to sell for food but also for pride and because he is a fisherman, and that he loved the fish when he was alive and after. "If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?" he asks. The question remains unresolved, but the act of asking it—in the presence of the Sacred Heart and the Virgin—transforms the hunt into a spiritual ordeal. The pictures do not provide answers; they mark the space where the question is asked.

The Return and the Dream of the Lions

When Santiago finally reaches his shack after the three-day struggle, he lies face down on the bed, sleeping on the newspapers with his arms out straight and the palms of his hands up. The boy Manolin sits by him watching. The old man is dreaming about the lions. The religious pictures remain on the wall, but the final image of the book is not of the Sacred Heart or the Virgin—it is of the lions on the beach. The pictures have done their work: they have anchored Santiago's prayers, framed his moral struggle, and connected him to his dead wife. But the dream of the lions, which recurs throughout the story, is the last thing the reader sees. It suggests that what sustains Santiago at the deepest level is not doctrine but a vision of untamed, playful life—a vision that the religious pictures, as relics of a lost human love, have helped him preserve.