The Alchemist Themes

Put on your snorkel masks and dive into the super-abstract world of the Languages of the World, the Soul, and the Universe (all of which are one and the same). Don't know what we're talking about?...

What is love? What is air? What is … oh, never mind. You could ask Jim Carrey—or you could just try Paulo Coelho's Alchemist. Much like the other ideas in the novel, the concept of love is abst...

The Alchemist is no World War Z or The Book Thief, but it still has something to say about warfare. We don't get plunged into any violent, bloody battle scenes, but war is always present in the de...

The concepts of destiny and free will get pretty messy and hard to untangle in Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. For one thing, all the signs seem to point to the main character's having the ability to...

Are you frightened? Not nearly frightened enough… of losing your dreams. In The Alchemist, the #1 dream-killer is fear. Santiago is allowed to feel pretty much all of his feelings, but not fear:...

You can't get much more dreamy than Santiago—except maybe for the Englishman. In fact, the whole of The Alchemist is pretty much dedicated, page by page, to showing how the characters can achieve...

The Englishman is a student in a book-larnin' kind of school, full of obscure texts about alchemy and sort of terrifying teachers like the alchemist himself. Santiago, on the other hand, don't (ahe...

Socrates said that the only true wisdom was knowing you know nothing. Personally, we like Coelho's take: that true wisdom means knowing how to turn lead into gold. Okay, okay, so it's supposed to b...