In "The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway, the mythical race of masculinity is very much at work through the protagonist of Santiago. The story of Santiago's violent and epic fight with the marlin can be directly linked to the author's life as he lived in Key West, Florida and Cuba in the 1930s, where he fished in the Gulf Stream and the Caribbean. Hemingway's distinctive masculine tale continues in "The Old Man and the Sea" as it tells the story of an old fisherman trying to prove his worth in his craft after a drought of eighty-four days without fishing. His pride and arrogance lead him to go further out to sea than he ever had before, to catch a very valuable fish. His conspicuous bad luck, or saloa, has emasculated him and forced him to prove to the townspeople and to himself that he is not an untalented fisherman. Santiago brings with him many traditional masculine traits in how he views his task at hand and the struggles he endures. He considers the sea as a sort of arena for the survival of the fittest to whom he belongs, placing him, as a single man, against nature. His deep-rooted belief in the triumph of the individual to prove one's worth based on skill and technique is reflected in his admiration for baseball superstar Joe Dimaggio. His macho audacity will serve to massage his ego, revitalize his reputation and lift his spirits in his last days. The novella can be seen as patriarchal and chauvinistic through Santiago and his apparent lack of female characters. The only female representations are shown through the description of a pair of marlin, a mention of Santiago's late wife, who no longer exhibits in his hut, and the feminization of the sea. It can be argued that the... center of the paper... dualistic mission, thinking of his city and the men who helped him there during his drought with food and documents, especially the boy Manolin, admitting -“I live in a beautiful city” while also noting how pleasant it was to talk to another person (Manolin) upon his return. It is the submission of the mature man to the natural order. Not a natural order in the sense of the forces of nature but of the life cycle of a man. He realizes the folly of having to prove his masculinity against dangerous elements and animals and the delusions of grandeur it bestows on the big marlin. It's just because of his deceased wife and isolation won't do him any good. She decides that interdependence is the true way to cure her suffering by agreeing to set sail again with Manolin. The novel, however, is innately masculine and gender identities are strongly eschewed in favor of the male gaze.