The Little Mermaid: Afterlife
The Little Mermaid, however, isn’t a complete tragedy. In the story, the mermaid has a conversation about mortality with her grandmother. Her grandmother explains mermaids live about three hundred years, but when they die, they dissolve into sea foam, gone forever. Humans don’t live long but have an eternal soul. This makes her choice at the end of the tale especially tragic.
The mermaid knew by flinging herself into the sea she would be gone forever, dissolved into seafoam with no eternal soul. But in a twist that isn’t seen in many of these tragic tales, she is resurrected from the foam, and becomes a ‘daughter of the air.’ Like mermaids, they don’t have souls. But after three hundred years, if they earn it through kindness and good deeds, they can earn a soul, something the little mermaid desperately wanted.
