What does the "he/him" refer to in "I'll try to get him to work far out" in The Old Man and the Sea?

Question

I began to read The Old Man and the Sea recently. I'm reading a paperback but for the question I'm using the link to Gutenberg.

Soon after I started to read the book, I found I did not understand what the "him" and "He" refer to in the following dialog in which the old man and the boy were chatting about the plan for the next day:

"Tomorrow is going to be a good day with this current," he said.

"Where are you going?" the boy asked.

"Far out to come in when the wind shifts. I want to be out before it is light."

"I'll try to get him to work far out," the boy said. "Then if you hook something truly big we can come to your aid."

I re-read from the beginning a few times but still couldn't figure out who or what the "he/him" refers to.

Earlier in the conversation, Santiago, the old man, said to the boy, "I can still row and Rogelio will throw the net." Google shows "Rogelio" is a male name so I think the "he/him" here may refer to Rogelio. At the beginning, I thought this makes some sense because the boy said "...if you hook something truly big we can come to your aid." In my imagination, the boy was suggesting the following:

1. In the next day, the boy would go finishing with Santiago the old man and Rogelio. The three people would be on the same boat.
2. Santiago must be responsible for something that I haven't learned about by reading so far, but Rogelio would throw the net as the old man said.
3. If a really big fish would be caught, the boy and Rogelio would help the old man to deal with it. The "we" here refers to the boy and Rogelio.
4. When this conversation was happening, the boy had been required to work on another luckier boat, so, usually, the boy would not be able to work on the same boat as the old man. However, when the boy suggested fishing together the next day, the old man said "No. Go and play baseball." So I'm guessing the "next day" was a rest day for the fishermen and the boy would be able to do some recreational activities such as playing baseball. In other words, the boy would be free to do anything. This is why he was able to offer to go fishing together.

So far so good, until I went on reading and saw the later part of the conversation:

"He does not like to work too far out."

"No," the boy said. "But I will see something that he cannot see such as a bird working and get him to come out after dolphin."

"Are his eyes that bad?"

"He is almost blind."

"It is strange," the old man said. "He never went turtle-ing. That is what kills the eyes."

The old man asked "Are his eyes that bad?" It sounds like the old man didn't really know much about Rogelio, but if the old man and Rogelio had been working together, the old man should kind of know him. Besides, if "him" refers to Rogelio, what does it mean by "get him to come out after dolphin"? Get Rogelio to come out after dolphin?

Anyway, I'm confused by this "he/him". Appreciate if anyone could help me clarify.

Answer 1

The first sentence makes the situation clear, I think:

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week.

So the boy used to work on Santiago’s boat, but now he works on another, luckier, boat. However, the boy is still fond of Santiago. He reassures the old man:

“It was papa made me leave. I am a boy and I must obey him.”

and offers to help Santiago catch sardines and even to steal a bait-fish for him. So in this passage:

“Where are you going?” the boy asked.

“Far out to come in when the wind shifts. I want to be out before it is light.”

“I’ll try to get him to work far out,” the boy said. “Then if you hook something truly big we can come to your aid.”

we understand that boy’s plan is to convince “him” to fish in the same waters as Santiago, so that if Santiago gets into trouble the other boat can assist. So “him” must refer to the owner of the lucky boat on which the boy is currently working.

The other named character, Rogelio, is not the same as the owner of the lucky boat. This is clear because Santiago says that Rogelio will be helping him catch sardines, whereas the owner of the lucky boat would be catching his own sardines, not helping Santiago. Also, Santiago’s surprise at the poor eyesight of the owner of the lucky boat shows that the two fisherman are not very close.

This dialogue is not easy to follow, but that is surely a deliberate choice on Hemingway’s part, because it gives the narrative a realistic effect. The two characters are talking to each other about matters which are common to them, not explaining things to a reader. The boy knows that Santiago knows who he means by “him”, and doesn’t need to explain it for our benefit. It would not be realistic for him to say, “As you know, Santiago, we will be going out in two different boats tomorrow.”

Update In comments, Robbie Goodwin says that I am mistaken when I describe the difficulty in following the dialogue as a deliberate literary effect. He argues (in the alternative) that the difficulty is either “about simple language, not at all to do with literature” and so “this question belongs not here in Literature but rather to English Language Learners”, or that “if you have to work hard to figure it out” then Hemingway “got it wrong”. Against the first argument, the difficulty is in resolving an ambiguity, and the same ambiguity would exist in a translation, so it’s wrong to suggest that this is only due to lack of proficiency in English. The second argument is hard to square with the evidence that Hemingway thought carefully about the literary effect of omitting details. He wrote:

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

_{Ernest Hemingway (1923). Death in the Afternoon, page 183. London: Jonathan Cape.}