Week 13 Reading: Literary Works Hans Christian Andersen Part B

Week 13 Reading:

Literary Works Hans Christian Andersen Part B

This reading unit was focused only on the story of the Little Mermaid. Out of all the stories I've read that had Disney adaptations, this is the only one that has had so many parts to it. This story also is the least like its Disney counterpart than any other I've encountered as well. I love that this version included a female influence she could look to and an actual reason for her surface dwelling and initial emergence to looking at the world above. The imagery in this work was fantastic. I loved the word choice that separated the details of the sea when comparing it to the open land. There was also a bit of personification done to the water which helped in re-signifying the importance of it to the plot of the story. The author also chose to give as many instances of emotion for each character involved in a scene. He would recount when the Little Mermaid was excited or thought things were fun, while typically surface walkers and humans are mortified or aloof. This story is focused on the separation between a sea creature and a human being, so this method of describing everything helped to clearly paint out that divide. To include this much imagery, it makes sense for this story to be as long as it was. Each sentence had a beautiful style of writing; each having breaks by commas when needed and nothing became a run-on. This is something that I need to work on myself; specifically comma splices. The work is told in past tense form, and I wish that I looked into this before I started my project! I'm working on the same method, and I wasn't aware of the difficulty in keeping tense in a story that you'd want to be interactive. This is my last reading post for the semester, and I think I got to end it on a good note!

Image: The Little Mermaid (Wikimedia Commons)
Bibliography: Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Andersen, translated by H. P. Paull (Un-Textbook)