The Alchemist - part 2 (summary and analysis) PDF

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The Alchemist - part 2 (summary and analysis)...

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Summary and Analysis Part 2: Crystal Merchant Episode (II) Summary Part Two begins after Santiago has worked for one month at the crystal merchant's shop. Santiago offers to build a display case for the crystal, which the merchant can put outside his shop to attract potential customers. The crystal merchant fears that passers-by will bump into it and break the glass. Santiago responds that business has improved since he began working at the store and that the merchant should take advantage of this trend. He explains the idea, learned from the king of Salem, of moving when luck is on one's side — the principle of favorability. After two more months, with the display case in place outside the store having generated an enormous amount of new business, Santiago figures that if he returns home with all the money he has made, he can double his flock in less than a year. Also, he can trade with the Arabs in Tangier or in Spain, because he has learned to speak Arabic. Hearing a tourist complain of thirst after climbing the hill to the crystal shop, Santiago suggests to the crystal merchant that they sell tea and serve it in the crystal, which in turn will help them sell more crystal. Meanwhile, Santiago's aspirations have encouraged the merchant to recall his own abandoned dreams. He uses the word that will feature prominently in this section of the novel: maktub, meaning "It is written." In Western terms, maktub means that something is destined, meant to be. Santiago and the crystal merchant offer tea at the store, and their venture is a huge financial success. After eleven months and nine days in Tangier, Santiago has earned enough money to buy one hundred and twenty sheep, a return ticket to Andalusia, and a license to import products from Africa. The crystal merchant has made enough to travel to Mecca, one of his own life's aspirations. But the merchant tells Santiago ". . . you know that I'm not going to go to Mecca. Just as you know that you're not going to buy your sheep." The merchant is right. When the stones Urim and Thummim spill out of Santiago's jacket, he recalls Melchizedek and his teachings. Santiago realizes that he will always be able to return to Andalusia and the life of a shepherd, but he will not always be able to visit the Egyptian pyramids. He decides to forge onward in pursuit of his Personal Legend. Analysis

In literary terms, the crystal merchant is considered to be Santiago's foil, a character who demonstrates by contrast everything that another character is and isn't. For instance, Santiago innovates and works hard to better the crystal shop's visibility and appeal, while after thirty years the merchant has stopped trying to improve his business. In the greater scheme of things, Santiago is seeking his Personal Legend, whereas the crystal merchant is not. Once he desired to travel to Mecca, one of the five acts required of a devout Muslim. But even after Santiago's changes to the crystal business have brought in enough money to make that possible, the crystal merchant does not seek Mecca. He has abandoned his Personal Legend. By contrast, Santiago earns enough to return to the life that is most comfortable to him, that of a shepherd, yet he chooses to renounce this in his quest to reach the pyramids. The Arabic word maktub sums up the crystal merchant's philosophy: He does something because "it is written" — that is, fated — rather than as a result of his own hopes and desires. Unlike Santiago, he lives life passively, as one who reacts to events rather than as a shaper of them. Coelho offers readers the character of the crystal merchant as an example of how not to live, versus the active, questing ideal embodied by The Alchemist's protagonist, Santiago. The crystal merchant is not a bad man. In fact, he's quite ordinary. But it is precisely his ordinariness that the novel warns against. He is not a villain, or even an antagonist; he is simply Santiago's foil.

Summary and Analysis Part 2: Englishman Episode Summary We now meet a fourth important character, the Englishman. The Englishman spent a decade at a university trying to find the one true language of the universe. Before traveling to northern Africa, he studied Esperanto, an international language, then religions of the world, and finally alchemy. To the Englishman's dismay, however, the alchemists he has met won't teach him what he wants to know — perhaps, he conjectures, because they don't know it themselves. Surrounded by thick books, he awaits the departure of a caravan for Egypt. He hopes to travel through the Sahara desert to the Al-Fayoum oasis on the way there, reportedly the home of a two-hundred-year-old alchemist who can turn any metal into gold. After meeting the Englishman, Santiago removes Urim and Thummim from his pocket and is surprised when the Englishman shouts their names. The Englishman tells Santiago that the stones aren't valuable, then removes two identical stones from his

own pocket. Santiago tells him that the stones came from a king, a fact which the Englishman is not surprised to learn. "It was shepherds who were the first to recognize a king that the rest of the world refused to acknowledge," he says. The Englishman tells Santiago that Urim and Thummim were "the only form of divination permitted by God. The priests carried them in a golden breastplate." He speculates that this may be an omen, telling Santiago that everything in life is an omen. The Englishman also tells Santiago that he is in search of a universal language. Analysis Like Santiago, the Englishman too believes in omens. He is also on a quest, for "the one true language of the universe." Although the relationships are unclear at this point in the book, this language is synonymous with the "secret of the Master Work," and includes something called the Philosopher's Stone, which is related somehow to the Elixir of Life. Perhaps the author's point is that the Englishman has not reached his goal because he has not focused it sufficiently. He cannot fulfill his Personal Legend because it is too vague and jumbled. Prior to this episode in the novel, it has been difficult to place The Alchemist in time. Does the story take place fifty years ago, or five hundred? This vagueness with respect to setting is intentional on Coelho's part, as it lends his book a mythic, timeless tone. When the Englishman mentions having studied Esperanto, however, the reader can deduce that The Alchemist is set sometime during the last century and a half, since Esperanto was introduced by the linguist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887. When the Englishman speaks of shepherds who recognized a king, he means the "king of kings," Jesus Christ. According to the New Testament, Mary gave birth to Jesus in a stable, where shepherds who had been attracted by a star that shone directly overhead discovered the Son of God. The Englishman introduces another function of omens in The Alchemist. He tells Santiago (whom he first mistakes for an Arab) that omens are not just for following on the way to achieving one's Personal Legend. They also can help a person understand the language of the universe. As described by the Englishman, the language of the universe is a kind of lost knowledge — information that everyone in the world used to know, without having to read books. This knowledge has somehow vanished, but the Englishman plans on recovering it with the help of an alchemist.

Summary and Analysis Part 2: Caravan Episode Summary Santiago and the Englishman join the caravan, which consists of over two hundred people. Just before they leave, the Englishman says "There's no such thing as coincidence." Santiago reflects that "The closer one gets to realizing his Personal Legend, the more that Personal Legend becomes his true reason for being . . ." Crossing the desert with the caravan, Santiago wonders if he is learning the "universal language that deals with the past and the present of all people." Santiago's mother referred to this knowledge as a hunch, while the crystal merchant used the term maktub ("it is written"); it could also be called intuition. Santiago throws his book away once he realizes that he will learn more from the caravan and the camel driver and also by observing his own camel. At night, the camel driver tells Santiago about his former life as a farmer outside Cairo with an orchard full of fruit. He had children and land and he took an opportunity to make the same pilgrimage to Mecca that the crystal merchant spoke of. The Nile flooded its banks, however, destroying his fruit trees and forcing him to become a camel driver. As a result, he learned a painful but important lesson: There is no need to fear the unknown if you can achieve what you need to survive. Because of the threat of danger, the caravan starts to travel faster and more quietly. The caravan leader decides that they should no longer light a fire after dark. One night, when the Englishman can't sleep, he asks Santiago about his experiences with the crystal merchant and is impressed by what he hears. "That's the principal that governs all things," the Englishman explains. "In alchemy, it's called the Soul of the World. When you want something with all your heart, that's when you are closest to the Soul of the World. It's always a positive force." Santiago tries to read the Englishman's books. They are strange books, however, covering the properties of mercury and salt, discussing kings and dragons. And they assert one proposition above all others: that "all things are the manifestation of one thing only." In fact, the most significant text in all of alchemy consists of only a few lines once etched on the surface of an emerald. If the truth of everything is written on the surface of a single precious stone, Santiago wonders, why do people need to read so many big books? The one book that interests Santiago the most tells the life stories of famous alchemists, who dedicated their lives to purifying metals. These alchemists believed that if they

heated a metal for many years, it would free itself of its individual properties, leaving behind the Soul of the World. The Soul of the World allowed alchemists to understand everything on earth, since it was "the language with which all things communicated." The alchemists called the discovery of this language the Master Work. Santiago learns that the Master Work is composed of two parts, one liquid and one solid. (It is unclear how something can be liquid and solid as well as a language and also a soul.) The liquid portion is known as the Elixir of Life, which cures illnesses and is responsible for keeping alchemists young. The solid part of the Master Work is called the Philosopher's Stone, a small sliver of which is all that's needed to turn any metal into gold. Everyone in the caravan is on edge, wary of anything that might hint of a raid by one of the warring desert tribes. Only Santiago's friend the camel driver seems unconcerned. He tells the shepherd boy the reason he is unafraid of the war between the tribes is because he lives only in the present. "If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man," he says. "Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we're living right now." Analysis In the words of the camel driver, "We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written with the same hand." This lesson seems consistent with maktub ("it is written"), the philosophy that prevented the crystal merchant from actively pursuing his dream of visiting Mecca — from trying, that is, to fulfill his Personal Legend. Here, though, Coelho gives it a positive spin: It is our duty to take what life gives us, the author seems to be saying through his character the camel driver, and make the best of it. Note that although Santiago is not looking to understand the language of the world, he is inadvertently learning to do so. While his own quest is towards his Personal Legend and thus a buried treasure, the simple Spanish shepherd boy cannot help but start to become one with the universe. He does so by traveling through worlds that are new to him (Tangier, the Sahara), and by observing a new religion (Islam) and new peoples (Arabs and Africans). As Santiago tells the Englishman, still lost in his books in the midst of the desert, "You should pay more attention to the caravan . . . We make a lot of detours, but we're always heading for the same destination."

In talking to Santiago about his experiences at the crystal shop, the Englishman makes a statement that is central to The Alchemist's philosophy — that "the earth is alive . . . and it has a soul. We are part of that soul, so we rarely recognize that it is working for us. But in the crystal shop you probably realized that even the glasses were collaborating in your success." Although this idea is new to Santiago, the attribution of spirits to inanimate objects is a form of religion common to many primitive cultures known as animism. Santiago's discovery that the surface of a single emerald contains the world's most important knowledge points out another of The Alchemist's fundamental propositions: that books should be straightforward and easy to understand. People make all things, including their books, too complicated, and eventually they cannot return to the simple truths that everyone once knew. Santiago begins to wonder if, in working for the crystal merchant, he was engaged in a kind of alchemy. The Englishman, by contrast, believes that alchemy can be learned only from a master alchemist and after reading many difficult books on the subject. This is another instance of The Alchemist's point of view that experience is the best teacher. The episode's final lesson, delivered to Santiago by the camel driver, is not inconsistent with this — that living in the present is the richest, most rewarding way of life....