When I read The Little Mermaid for the 1st time, I just didn’t like it. It gave me a bad feeling. Although I was just a child, but I had a feeling that something was so not fair about this story. After all, the little mermaid was the one who rescued the prince & she made so many sacrifices & yet the prince falls in love with someone else. And he didn’t even know it was she who had rescued him when he was about to die. She had a beautiful voice, but she exchanged it with a witch for 2 legs. When you can’t tell someone something that meant everything to you, what’s the point of that life? She gave up so much & she didn’t get anything. I didn’t want to read it again, but when I went through this story again as an adult, I couldn’t help feeling bad once more. Although the story is about a mermaid, but it’s not different from what happens to humans. It’s about how one goes through shit & gets nothing! But nevertheless Hans Andersen has written a great story.
I have taken out 2 paragraphs & there are more than enough to understand that pain of any being is not different& trials are never easy:
“A mermaid has no immortal soul & can never have one unless she wins the love of a mortal. Her immortality depends on an unknown power. The daughters of the air have no immortal souls, either, but by good deeds they can create one for themselves. We fly to the hot countries, where the humid, pestilential air kills mortals. There we waft cooling breezes. We spread the fragrance of flowers through the air & send refreshment & healing. After striving for three hundred years to do what good we can, we then receive an immortal soul & share in the eternal happiness of mortals…
Unseen we float into the houses of mortals where there are children, & for every day that we find a good child who makes his parents happy & deserves their love, God shortens our period of trial. The child does not know when we fly through the room, & when we smile over it with joy a year is taken from the three hundred. But if we see a naughty & wicked child we must weep tears of sorrow, & each tear adds a day to our period of trial!”
