However, I failed to adequately connect the last definition  with applicable text.  Once Lacan’s Real Order is defined, it is never explicitly discussed again.  After retracing my thoughts, I think the omission of the Real Order occurs because I had not discovered the reader’s epiphany until I had already written the first few paragraphs.  Initially, I had planned to end my analysis with the old man’s epiphany discovered in the dissonance [the Real Order] between the Symbolic Order and the Semiotic language of the old man.  Yet, well into the paper, I discovered that Hemingway seemed to want the reader to have the epiphany through Santiago’s ignorance of the fish’s fate.   This revelation seemed to deflate the importance of the protagonist’s own epiphanies.