Published in 1952, The Old Man and the Sea soon became Ernest Hemingway's most influential and critically acclaimed book worldwide. Both the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 were awarded to him “for his mastery of the art of storytelling, demonstrated most recently in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence he has exerted on contemporary style . " Bernard Berenson, close friend and renowned art critic, praised: “No true artist symbolizes or allegorizes – and Hemingway is a true artist – but every true work of art exudes symbols and allegories. The same goes for this short but no small masterpiece. “On a superficial level, The Old Man and the Sea simply presents the simple story of an old man. However, beneath all this emerges an intrinsically delicate network of deeper themes and motifs, ranging from life symbols and death, strength and determination, to the biblical stories and parables of Jesus' crucifixion, to classical images and mythological aspects. These images transform a simple tale into a complex and inspiring account of almost legendary feats and the sea has been analyzed and criticized since its publication. Thus, my goal in this essay is to expand the symbols and allegories of the Old Man and the Sea using Sophocles' Oedipus the King, the Greek myth of Oedipus, and explore the extent to which Freud's psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus complex can be applied, thus bringing about a different and renewed perspective on Hemingway's short story. In The Old Man and the Sea, the most important allegory occurs in Santiago and Oedipus. Their lives and destinies are linked, in different but very similar ways, as we will see later. The first ones...... middle of the paper......Butcher. (2007), February 20, 2011. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.htmlHarada, Keiichi. “The Marlin and the Shark: A Note on the Old Man and the Sea.” Donnell, Sean M. "The Old Man and the Sea: The Dialectic of Hemingway's Images." (2002) February 20, 2011. http://www.elcamino.edu/Faculty/sdonnell/hemingway_3.htm#Top%20of%20PageHemingway, Ernest. The old man and the sea. (Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1952)“The Nobel Prize for Literature 1954”. Nobelprize.org. February 19, 2011. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/#Poore, Charles. “Books: Hemingway.” The New York Times. (July 3, 1961) February 19, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-obit3.htmld'Aulaires, Ingrid, and Edgar Parin. Book of Greek myths. (Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.: New York, 1962), pp. 158-161.