Water serves a symbolic function in each story, testing of the strength and endurance of each main character, Huck in Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Santiago in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. Huck, for example, travels uneasily down the Mississippi River on a raft with his guardian Miss Watson's escaped slave, Jim. Hemingway's Santiago struggles unsuccessfully at sea with a huge marlin that he lands but which is then eaten by sharks. .

             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. .

             Another key similarity within Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, is that in each of these works, the main character sets out on a quest or journey, the process of which changes and deepens the main character along the way.