the party of tourists as outsiders

The party of tourists appears only in the final pages of The Old Man and the Sea, yet their brief, uncomprehending encounter with the marlin's skeleton provides the novel's most pointed commentary on the chasm between heroic experience and ordinary perception. These visitors, who have no connection to the fishing community or to Santiago's ordeal, see only the physical remains of the great fish—a long white spine with a huge tail—and, guided by a waiter's casual misidentification, walk away believing they have seen a shark. The moment crystallizes the novel's central irony: a struggle that has cost Santiago everything—his strength, his catch, his harpoon, his knife—and that has been witnessed by the sea, the stars, and the boy Manolin, is reduced in the public eye to a tourist's idle curiosity, a sight no more meaningful than the empty beer cans and dead barracudas floating in the same water.

The Scene of Misrecognition

That afternoon, after Santiago has slept and the boy has wept and the fishermen have measured the skeleton at eighteen feet from nose to tail, a party of tourists gathers on the Terrace. Looking down into the water among the empty beer cans and dead barracudas, a woman sees the great long white spine with the huge tail at the end, lifting and swinging with the tide while the east wind blows a heavy steady sea outside the entrance to the harbour. She points and asks a waiter, "What's that?" The waiter, meaning to explain what has happened, answers with a single word: "Tiburon"—shark. The woman, impressed, remarks, "I didn't know sharks had such handsome, beautifully formed tails," and her male companion echoes her ignorance: "I didn't either." The exchange is devastating in its economy. The waiter's intended explanation never arrives; the tourists leave with a false, comfortable story, and the skeleton—the only physical evidence of Santiago's three-day battle—is consigned to the category of "garbage waiting to go out with the tide."

The Tourists as Outsiders

The tourists belong to a world entirely separate from Santiago's. They are not fishermen, not members of the Terrace community, not even locals. They arrive as casual observers, consuming the harbor view as they might consume any other spectacle. Their presence echoes an earlier moment in the novel when the successful fishermen butchered their marlin and carried them to the fish house to wait for the ice truck to Havana, while those who had caught sharks took them to the shark factory on the other side of the cove—a world of labor, skill, and economic necessity that the tourists never see. The woman's aesthetic appreciation of the tail—"handsome, beautifully formed"—is the language of a sightseer, not of a person who has ever fought a fish or measured a skeleton. She and her companion are the ultimate outsiders, and their misreading is the novel's final demonstration that Santiago's achievement, however monumental, is invisible to those who lack the framework to understand it.

The Contrast with the Community's Response

The tourists' incomprehension stands in sharp contrast to the response of the fishing community. The boy Manolin, when he sees the old man's hands, starts to cry and does not care that the fishermen see him. The proprietor of the Terrace, Martin, who has sent meals to Santiago before, declares, "There has never been such a fish." The fisherman who measures the skeleton calls out the length with professional precision. Even the waiter, though he fails to explain, at least knows the word for shark and understands that something has happened. The community, however imperfectly, recognizes the magnitude of what Santiago has done. The tourists, by contrast, have no context, no shared history, no emotional investment. They see only an object, and they misname it. The novel ends not with their misunderstanding but with Santiago dreaming of the lions, but the tourists' scene has already delivered its verdict: the world outside the community of fishermen will never know what happened.

Thematic Significance: The Incommunicability of Heroic Experience

The tourists' misrecognition of the skeleton is the novel's final working-out of a theme that runs throughout: the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of communicating the full weight of a solitary ordeal. Santiago himself has felt this isolation. Alone on the sea, he speaks aloud to himself, to the fish, to the birds, to the stars, because there is no one else to hear. He wishes for the boy, for a radio, for someone to witness what he is doing. When he returns, he tells Manolin, "They beat me. They truly beat me," and the boy corrects him: "He didn't beat you. Not the fish." But the tourists, who have no relationship with Santiago, receive no such correction. They take the skeleton for a shark, and that is the end of it. The novel thus ends with a kind of epistemological tragedy: the truth of Santiago's struggle—his love for the fish, his respect for it, his determination to kill it, his grief when the sharks destroy it—is locked inside him, visible only to those who already know how to see. The tourists, who do not, see only garbage.

The Skeleton as a Final Image

The skeleton itself, stripped of all flesh, is a powerful and ambiguous symbol. It is all that remains of the marlin that Santiago called his brother, that he loved and respected and killed, that he said was "two feet longer than the skiff." It is also, in the tourists' eyes, merely a curiosity. The waiter's single word—"Tiburon"—is the last spoken description of the fish in the novel, and it is wrong. The skeleton will go out with the tide, and the tourists will carry away their mistaken impression. But the old man, sleeping in his shack, dreaming of the lions on the beach, is beyond caring. The novel's final image is not the tourists' confusion but Santiago's dream, a return to the private, interior world that has sustained him all along. The tourists, for all their presence in the final pages, are irrelevant to that dream. They are the noise of the world, and the old man, at last, is asleep.