What is the significance of the title in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea?

The title has great significance, it foreshadows some of
the important themes of Hemingway's novella, The Old Man and the
Sea. In addition, the title focuses our attention on the central relationship
in the story, that between the old man, Santiago, and the sea, including the mighty and
terrible creatures that live therein. The title tells us that while Santiago's
relationship to Manolin is important and the embodiment of the themes of love and youth
versus old age, it is not the central relationship in the story.

One
theme the title foreshadows is that of the human condition. Hemingway explores the
struggle of humankind to survive in an environment that is fierce and forever needs
subduing. For a lifetime, Santiago has gone out onto the mighty sea to wrestle
livelihood from it by simultaneously understanding and working in harmony with its ways
and overpowering it and conquering its ways. It is the old man in a contest with the
sea--especially the contest with the marlin that Hemingway tells of--that embodies the
human condition of struggle and harmony with and in our
environment.

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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. ...
Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the .sea
and were cheerful and undefeated.