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Comparing The Alchemist And The Odyssey: A Personal Hero's Journey

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Throughout history, people around the world have embarked on their own personal hero’s journeys. From great warriors like Achilles, to average people living on the streets. Every story is different and unique, like a snowflake. In the stories The Odyssey, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Alchemist, Odysseus, Edmond Dantes, and Santiago all went through their own personal hero’s journeys. All of their journeys are unique in their own ways, yet all of them can be compared to the hero’s journey. These stories each display distinct way of expressing and showing the female protagonists, and also have different Abyss’s and all mean different things to each of them. In The Odyssey, Odysseus starts his hero’s journey in Ithaca, and goes to Troy. …show more content…

The child grabs his hand and takes him to the pyramids of Egypt and tells him about a treasure there. This dream was his call to adventure. He returns home to find treasure, but realizes his true treasure was Fatima. In The Alchemist, the female protagonist is Fatima, the girl he met by the well at the oasis. Even though in the book Santiago doesn’t spend an immense amount of time with Fatima, and the book doesn't tell much about her, she plays a key role in the book and in Santiago’s heart. In the book, Santiago’s falls in love at first sight with her. He is absolutely star struck when he sees her. “At that moment, it seemed to him that time stood still...It was love”Alchemist(page). She almost stops Santiago from finding his treasure because he would rather stay with her in the oasis, but she urges him to go to Egypt because she believes that if it’s meant to be he will return to her, thus inspiring him even further. Both female protagonists in The Alchemist and The Odyssey help the main male protagonists reach their final goal, which is finding them and finding love. Fatima contributes her part both physically by speaking to Santiago and telling him to find his treasure, and emotionally by being in his heart. While Penelope has no physical importance to Odysseus until he finally reaches home in Ithaca. In The Odyssey, the book travels back to what is going on in Ithaca with Penelope, and in The Alchemist, the reader doesn’t even meet Fatima until the middle of the book, and then she doesn’t return until the end. The abyss in The alchemist is when Santiago is in the desert and he is trying to become the wind. He is upset that the alchemist set him up for failure. He asked the sun to turn him into the wind. The sun complains that people always want more and that Santiago asking to turn into the

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