Santiago's Pride Continued.

Santiago is so full of pride, that I am making another blog about his mountains of pride.

"I don’t think I can eat an entire one," he said and drew his knife across one of the strips. He could feel the steady hard pull of the line and his left hand was cramped. It drew up tight on the heavy cord and he looked at it in disgust.

"What kind of a hand is that," he said. "Cramp then if you want. Make yourself into a claw. It will do you no good."

When I first read this novel, I thought the quote was funny because he was talking to his hand. But now that I am reflecting upon it, I see it differently. He is pretending that his cramped hand is a whole different being than him because it hurts his pride to see that it is his own hand cramping up. He basically disowned his own hand for being weak and cramped. There was not even anybody around to see that his hand was cramped, so it’s not like people were going to judge him. Even if people were around, hand cramps happen to the best of us! He is just being a wimp.

“I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one’s own body. It is humiliating before others to have a diarrhea from ptomaine poisoning or to vomit from it. But a cramp, he thought of it as a calambre, humiliates oneself especially when one is alone.”

This is another post about his poor hand who was disowned earlier. I do not think a cramp is humiliating. They happen to everybody, he should think of himself as the only one to get a cramp in their hand. He needs to climb off his high horse and realize that he can’t do anything about it. Or maybe if he hadn’t pushed his hand to work so hard, it would not be cramping up! It’s never his own fault, is it?