The Alchemist Essay

Response: From the start, the boy had fallen in love with Fatima. As you can see, the boy wanted to make sure Fatima knew his love for her and that he will come back. I think that love is one of those things that you cannot live without. Love is essential for one to survive. When the boy was on his long journey to the treasure, the thought of being able to go back to Fatima motivated him to conquer his quest.

Have you ever encountered problems while trying to fulfill a goal in your life? In the book The Alchemist, written by Paulo Coelho, a shepherd boy named Santiago overcomes obstacles to reach his personal legend. Throughout the book Santiago encounters many friends to help him fulfill his destiny. Santiago encounters many problems throughout the story. He overcomes them with the help of his friends and his wife-to-be. These problems shape Santiago into a dignified man of many traits.

“You can always turn a bad kisser into a good one,” Laura Prepon. Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist leads a modest and ordinary life as a shepherd. Santiago travelled constantly, exploring the Andalusian terrain. In his travels, Santiago met a woman who interpreted his dreams, and told him his treasure would lie in Egypt at the pyramids. However, Santiago believed that the dream interpreter was a phony, and he continued to herd his sheep. Soon after, he exchanged words with the King of Salem, and Santiago was once again told to venture to Egypt in order to find his treasure. After careful consideration, Santiago sells his precious sheep and begins his journey. An alchemist, somebody who turns lead

1. In the Alchemist, it says that our lives are incomplete without love. What do you think

The book The Alchemist was about a young man named Santiago who followed his dream to discover a hidden treasure. As Santiago progressed throughout his journey, his character changed a lot. Santiago, a man who has great instincts, is afraid to trust his dream at the beginning of the book but over time becomes more and more confident with his choices in in this aspect he changes from the beginning of the book to the end.

The book I read is called The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. The Alchemist is about a boy from Spain, whose name is Santiago and is a shepherd. The book tells how he gets around countries, and how he deals with his problems and how he solves them. It shows how he follows his dreams, and who helps him along the way.

The phrase used by the narrator implies that even when times are difficult, a person who has faith and commitment will achieve its goal. Just like the novel, Santiago runs into numerously difficult situations when trying to find the destination to the treasure he dreamed of.

Some may refer to The Alchemist as a best-selling novel written by Paulo Coelho which explains the ideas of having a dream, or Personal Legend, and going through obstacles to conquer it. The book starts off like any other, introducing and describing the main characters, in this case Santiago is the first to share the interest of peers reading the story. He is said to be a small town shepherd boy who will do anything for his flock of sheep. In the opening scene of the story, Santiago takes his flock to an abandoned church and lies down under a sycamore tree hoping to get some rest. He is soon woken up from a disturbing dream which foreshadows further into the story of his own Personal Legend. Later in the book, Santiago is faced with multiple tests to be successful in finding his treasure. “Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure” (Coelho 15). Paulo continues to add characters in the book that help Santiago throughout his journey.

The alchemist is a well written book that accurately describes every concept about life and explains it through a story. The Alchemist is a book about a shepherd named Santiago, who discovers his personal legend and receives help from others to help achieve his Personal Legend and learns many major life lessons along the way. Santiago gets advice that when life puts him down, keep getting back up and to focus on the task at hand, which is Santiago’s own personal legend. Along the the journey, Santiago receives help from many different characters but only three characters who helped him the most throughout his quest for his Personal legend is the alchemist, the Old King and the Englishman. The best advice a reader is able to gain from this story is the advice the the Old King taught Santiago, which is” there is only one thing that makes achieving a dream impossible to achieve, the fear of failure” which means is to never be afraid of failures and to follow your own path God has laid out for you because if you are too afraid to pursue your personal legend, meaning if people are too afraid to take risks to make their own life better than it already is now, then they will not have the opportunity to accomplish their own goals. In Coelho's The Alchemist, Santiago learns the Soul of the World through experience, patience, time and help from the Old King, the Englishman and the alchemist.

The Alchemist is a journey of exploration and self-discovery as we follow the main character, Santiago, a young shepherd who lives in Spain, on a journey to fulfill his personal legend. The novel shows us wisdoms and gentle reminders of how to change our lives from what they may be today into the life we have always dreamed of.

There are many obstacles in everyday life, but none as detrimental to ones future as fear. Fear can cause people to not only avoid achieving their goals in life but it also forces them to think about it throughout every day. Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist shows that those who wallow in fear will never achieve their personal legend, and those who conquer fear will achieve anything they strive for. Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist is a commonly analyzed and criticized piece of literature. One of these articles is Rejendra Kumar Dash’s “Alchemy of the Soul: A Comparative Study of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist”. Dash’s article is a literary criticism of the different parts of the character’s journey in The Alchemist.

I would defiantly recommend this book to a friend or a family member. I fervently enjoyed “The Alchemist,” and I think that most people would enjoy reading about Santiago. The novel is universal in its ability to tell a story and

The Alchemist, a novel written by Paulo Coelho teaches us about the importance of self-discovery and exploration by taking us through the journey of a young Andalusian shepherd, Santiago. Paulo Coelho was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on August 24th 1947, to Pedro Quiema Coelho de Souza, an engineer, and his wife, Lygia, a homemaker. Paulo early on had dreamed of an artistic career and then after his surroundings in Jesuit school, he discovered his true vocation was to be a writer (Coelho 195). Upon telling his mom, she told him that his father was an engineer, a reasonable and logical man and had a clear view of the world. At the age of 16, Paulo’s opposition against following a traditional path led to his parents committing him into a mental institution (Paulo Coelho). To satisfy his parents, he enrolled in law school. However, it led him to mental illness and failing his career. After many years, he gave a shot at his dream profession and started to write. Paulo wrote The Pilgrimage: Diary of Magus which described his experiences and his discovery that the extraordinary occurs in the lives of ordinary people. He was the recipient of numerous international awards, amongst them the Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum. The Pilgrimage was published in 1987 and The Alchemist was published in 1988, a year after. Both novels appeared on the best sellers list but The Alchemist continued to sell more copies than any other book in Brazilian literary history. The Alchemist,

Personal Perspective is how an individual view the world around them, different people perceives different things and that could shape their personality. In the novel, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, a boy who is a shepherd tries to seek a treasure in which he sees it in his dream. There are many obstacles that he has to overcome, he met numerous individuals along the way and learned valuable life lessons. People may grow differently depends on how they perceive the world, and if the way they comprehend the world changed, they could also change who they are as a

Alchemist is already explained in the story as it is the ability to purify your soul, listen to your heart and speak the language of the world. The title is, then, to show us, the readers, that anyone can achieve his/her dream by possessing the characteristics of alchemist as exactly as the shepherd boy, Santiago.