How can Ernest Hemingway's short novel The Old Man and the Sea be considered a "fable"?

Can Ernest Hemingway’s short novel The Old Man
and the Sea be classified as a “fable”?  Everything depends, of course, on
how the word “fable” is defined.  For present purposes, the definition of that word
provided by Wikipedia will suffice:

A
fable is a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse,
that features href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal">animals, mythical
creatures, href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant">plants, href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inanimate">inanimate objects, or title="Nature" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature">forces of nature
which are href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphized">anthropomorphized
(given human
qualities), and that illustrates a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral">moral lesson (a "moral"), which
may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_%28saying%29">maxim.

Hemingway’s
novel resembles a “fable” in this sense in a number of ways, including the
following:

• It is relatively brief and
  “succinct.” Given its rather simple, straightforward “story,” the novel would not seem
  nearly as much like a “fable” if it were two or three times its present length.  Instead
  it would seem too complex and too long to be a fable in the sense defined
  above.


• It features an animal – the marlin Santiago fights
  – that seems mythical in its significance and symbolism.  If Santiago had caught an
  especially resistant tuna on the end of his line, the symbolic, mythical significance of
  the contest would not seem as great. (He in fact catches a tune and simply eats
  it.)


• The marlin, the sharks, and the sea itself all seem
  to symbolize the forces of nature in powerful, memorable ways. All test the strength,
  resilience, and determination of the old man.  If he were not alone in the boat, his
  struggle would not seem nearly as mythic, grand, or
  significant.


• Both the marlin and the sharks are
  anthropomorphized – that is, treated and described as if they were human. Indeed,
  Santiago tends to look at big fish in general as if they are humans and worthy of
  respect, as when the narrator reports that
  he

readability="14">

remembered the time he had hooked one of a pair
or marlin.  The male fish always let the female fish feed first and the hooked fish, the
female, made a wild, panic-stricken, despairing flight that soon exhausted her, and all
the time the male stayed with her, crossing the line and circling with her on the
surface.

Here the behavior of
the two fish seems completely understandable in human terms, however accurate it may
also be (or not be) as a description of the “real” behavior of
marlins.

• The novel can be said to exemplify a
  number of “morals,” such as the importance of never giving up, the fact that life is
  unfair, the need to display one’s strength of character even or especially in old age,
  the value of old people as models of behavior,
  etc.