The Fisherman

Abe, the protagonist and first-person narrator of The Fisherman, first ventured into fishing after the death of the youthful Marie, his wife of two years. Abe first met Marie, who was 15 years his junior, at the IBM building in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he worked as a systems analyst. Soon after their honeymoon, Marie was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer, and after her death, Abe experienced deep depression and alcohol addiction. Suddenly, he felt an almost visceral urge to go fishing, and in retrospect, he feels that this new avocation probably saved his life by giving his lonely days a calming, meditative rhythm. In his more mystical moments, he often wonders whether Marie, having made her way into “the soil [and] water, […] found a way to lead [him] back to her” (13). In his forays into the natural world, Abe fishes for a miracle, for a sense of the imperishability of life, but these spiritual hopes become the literal stuff of nightmares when he has a dream of hooking his dead wife through her mouth with a fishing line. His inexplicable dream of a golden-eyed, preternatural form of Marie relays prescient details about the supernatural horrors to come.