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Santiago's Mentors In The Alchemist

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Matthew Price Mrs. Martin English 4/21/2024. How Did the Mentors of Santiago Affect His Life? In the parable, The Alchemist, Paul Coelho demonstrates how Santiago's mentors affect his day-to-day life until he's ready to go off alone. Santiago's mentors play a large role in this book, because he couldn’t have found his treasure without them. Throughout his journey, he has both human and divine mentors. In the first part of the story, Santiago deals with human mentor relationships, both with himself and a wise old man. Santiago shows how he relied on self-guidance, saying that “lives are controlled by fate” (Coelho 20). Therefore, he was not in control of his own life, but the choices he made were controlled by fate. The second mentor Santiago had was a wise old man who taught him …show more content…

The wise man is stating that you need to get to know the person's surroundings before trusting them. Santiago learned to trust both himself and others only after getting to know them and making decisions that could positively impact his life. Towards the middle and the end of the story, Santiago runs into the Alchemist, a divine being, who has the biggest and most important impact on him during his journey. The alchemist is one of Santiago’s acquaintances who teaches him “[e]verything [he] need[s] to know” except for one thing that he figures out at the end of the section, which is his life’s purpose (Coelho 129). This conversation with the alchemist reveals to Santiago that he has learned every lesson for him to learn, and now he just needs to discover his life’s purpose. The second most important conversation Santiago has with the alchemist is about how Santiago doesn’t need “to understand the desert” he just needs to understand one single grain of the sand to understand the marvels of the world. Coelho 131. What this means is that, unlike the alchemist who works in labs and has access to the philosopher's stone to tell them the marvels of

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