Several general comparisons between the two authors and their works can be made. Mark Twain's and Ernest Hemingway's writing styles and choices of subject matter are distinct, but their approaches to writing are similar. Each, for example, writes honestly and often from personal experience. Mark Twain, however, is more of a humorist, while Ernest Hemingway uses little humor in his writing and is more of a journalistic-style realist. Both use naturalistic elements within their fiction, e.g., rivers; oceans, and/or other phenomena of nature, against which humankind proves relatively weak. Ea

In both works, also, each main character, Huck in Huckleberry Finn and Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, has an unusual and unlikely friend, someone unlike himself in age and ethnicity, who nevertheless leads the way toward greater self-knowledge for the main character. In both cases, also, the main character's friend helps him along a difficult path and supports his decisions and values. Without that friend each character is alone. In Huckleberry Finn, Huck must choose, at several points in the story, between friendship and allegiance to Jim, or the alternative values of his pro-slavery society. In Santiago's case, his friend, the young boy who helps him fish sometimes, cares not at all if Santiago catches fish, for he knows, implicitly, the value of Santiago as a person, with or without his catching any fish. As the boy tells Santiago about why he could not fish with him before: "It was papa who made me leave. I am a boy and I must obey him" (Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, p. 10) As the boy also tells Santiago, trying to assure the old fisherman that his bad luck will change, "I would like to go. If I cannot fish with you, I would like to serve in some way" (Hemingway, p. 12). By the end of the story, moreover, as Hemingway also infers, Santiago understands better what the boy sees in him, and always has seen in him. decides, even if they are "right" for society, are still wrong for him.

In Santiago's case, within Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, the tired old fisherman, who has been down on his luck for some time, must decide, during his protracted efforts to land the huge struggling fish, if he will continue to try his best to prevail over the forces of nature, and his own physical infirmities and weaknesses, or instead simply allow nature to prevail over him. He opts for the latter, and puts up an admirably brave, even if futile struggle. In the end, Santiago is defeated physically, but not psychologically. The conclusion of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, then, represents perhaps a physical defeat for Santiago the fisherman, but a psychological and a human victory for Santiago the man.

Miss Watson, she took me to the closet and prayed, but nothing come of

dodgers and buttermilk, and pork and cabbage and greens-there ain't [sic]

Huck, similarly, must lose what he thinks he values, his connection, however ambiguous at times, to "sivilization" (Twain, Huckleberry Finn, p. 407) in order to come to understand which aspects of "sivilization" (Twain, Huckleberry Finn, p. 407) he truly values, away from the Widow Douglas's and Miss Watson's influence, and which aspects (like slavery) he cannot in good conscience support, whatever the potential social or other cost to himself.

like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a

Like Huck Finn in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Santiago's hardest battle, within Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, is against himself. While Huck must decide where his true loyalties and values lie, Santiago must decide if he will try his best to prevail over the forces of nature, and his own physical infirmities and weaknesses, or simply allow nature to prevail over him. He opts for the latter, and then puts up a protracted and admirably brave, even if futile struggle.

In terms of location, both Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and

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