Ecological Interpretation of Old Man and the SeaAbstract Ecocriticism offers a new angle to reevaluate the classics. The article will reanalyze Hemingways The Old Man and the Sea from an ecological perspective, so as to gain a view of Hemingways ecological consciousness and suggest a new way to understand Hemingway who concerns more about the interconnection and equality between man and nature.I. IntroductionWith the rise of ecocriticism in the 1960s, which offers a new perspective to reevaluate man and the nature relationship in literary works, the natural world in Hemingway writings has gradually received eco-critics attention. In the introduction to Hemingway and the Natural world, Robert E. Fleming points out that “Few authors in history have been so closely identified with the natural world as Ernest Hemingway.”11 Then what is ecocriticism?In contrast with other political forms of criticism, there has been actually no dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism. What is more, its scale has broadened quickly from nature writing, Romantic poetry, and canonical literature to take in film, TV, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. Meanwhile, ecocriticism has borrowed methodologies and theoretically-informed methods freely from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.In latest study, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies, Estok claims that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the functionthematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwiseof the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds” (“Shakespeare and Ecocriticism” 16-17). This echoes the functional approach of the cultural ecology branch of ecocriticism, which analyzes the analogies between ecosystems and imaginative texts and posits that such texts potentially have an ecological (regenerative, revitalizing) function in the cultural system (Zapf, Literary Ecology).After introducing the definition of ecocriticism, I will introduce The Old Man and the Sea. The Old Man and the Sea is the story of a fierce fighting between an old, poor fisherman and a large marlin. The novel begins with the description of the fisherman, who is named Santiago, has gone out fishing for 84 days without catching a fish. He is so unfortunate that his young apprentice, Manolin, has not been allowed by his parents to fish with the old man and he has been to follow a more successful fishermen. Whereas, Manolin keeps caring about the old man, so he visits Santiagos hut each night, hauling back his fishing gear, sending him food and discussing American baseball and his favorite player Joe DiMaggio. Santiago tells Manolin that on the next day, he will venture far out into the Gulf to fish, confident that his unlucky streak is near its end.Thus on the eighty-fifth day, Santiago goes out alone, taking his skiff far onto the Gulf. He sets his lines and, by noon of the first day, a big fish that he is sure is a marlin takes his bait. Santiago only found the marlin is swimming around his boat. Two days and two nights pass in this manner, during which the old man bears the tension of the line with his body. Yet, he is wounded by the struggle and in pain, Santiago expresses a compassionate appreciation for his adversary, for he often refers to him as a brother. He also determines that no one has the right to take the fish, for the marlin is dignified.On the third day of the fighting, the fish begins to circle the skiff, indicating his tiredness to the old man. Santiago, now completely worn out, uses all his strength he has left in him to pull the fish onto its side and stab the marlin with a harpoon, ending the long battle between the old man and the tenacious fish. Santiago straps the marlin to the side of his skiff and heads home, considering about the high price the fish will bring him at the market and how many people he will feed.While Santiago continues his journey back to the shore, a group of sharks are attracted to the trail of blood left by the marlin in the water. At first, Santiago kills a great shark with his harpoon. In this process, he loses that weapon in the process. He makes a new harpoon by strapping his knife to the end of an oar to help ward off the next line of sharks; in total, five sharks are slain and many others are driven away. But the sharks keep coming, and by nightfall the sharks have almost devoured the marlins entire carcass, leaving a skeleton consisting mostly of its backbone, its tail and its head. Finally reaching the shore before dawn on the next day, Santiago struggles on the way to his shack, carrying the heavy mast on his shoulder. Once home,