The Little Mermaid Analysis

People say that love can make you do crazy things. A short story written by Hans Andersen called “The Little Mermaid” sounds like a story based on this quote. This story is about a young mermaid who wants to be loved. In the story the young mermaid has a growing obsession with the world of the humans. She dreams of the day that she is allowed to go to the surface, sit on the rocks, and watch the ships go by. The girls are only allowed to go to the surfaces at the age of fifteen and at night. Since she was the youngest it seemed like, she had to wait for what seemed like forever to turn fifteen. When she finally turned fifteen she swam up to the surface, while she was up on the surface she saw a ship wreck. In all the wreckage was a young prince …show more content…
But, the deal was that she had to marry the prince to stay alive and also every time she would walk she would feel enormous amounts of pain. When the prince seen her walking around the city he had her brought back to his castle, during that time at the castle they had developed a love for one another. The prince’s parents told him he had arranged marriage already set up for him. So he picked to marry the new girl than the mermaid. The mermaid’s sisters missed her and wanted her to come back home so they gave up their hair to give her a chance to come home and be a mermaid again. In order for her to become a mermaid again she had to kill the prince. While she stood over prince as he slept she decided not to kill him. In the story “The Little Mermaid” the author Hans Andersen uses the young mermaid as a way to illustrate his theme that our desires can lead us to do crazy things. The author was able to depict his theme by making the young mermaid, a protagonist character in the story, a major character whose role is vitally important in building the elements of this theme as well as the overall development of the