Martin decides to become a writer

Martin Eden’s decision to become a writer transforms his self-education and longing for Ruth Morse into a vocation. On the return voyage from the South Seas, he sees writing as both a way to recreate the beauty he has encountered and a path into Ruth’s world. His ambition is expansive, but its deepest motive is personal: he imagines literary achievement as proof that he is worthy of her.

Background and Intellectual Preparation

During the eight-month expedition, Martin has worked deliberately on his speech and reading. After repeatedly studying grammar, he adds twenty dictionary words a day to his vocabulary, reviewing pronunciations and definitions while on watch or at the wheel. He practices common English phrases and sounds in order to speak more like Ruth. The discipline is difficult, but he notices that his speech is becoming cleaner and more correct than that of the ship’s officers and the gentleman-adventurers who financed the expedition. The effort gives him evidence of his capacity to change through sustained work.

He also gains access to a complete Shakespeare owned by the captain, who never reads it. Martin has earned permission to use the volumes by washing the captain’s clothes. For a time, the plays and their memorable passages shape his imagination: the world seems to take on the forms of Elizabethan tragedy and comedy, and Shakespeare’s language trains his ear for elevated English. The reading contributes to his developing sense of what literature can do, even as it introduces archaic language alongside the more practical speech he has been trying to master.

The Decision at Sea

The voyage has taught Martin both humility and confidence. He recognizes how much he does not know, yet feels that the difference between himself and his shipmates lies in potential rather than achievement: he believes they could do what he can do, while sensing that he has not yet realized what is within him. At the same time, the beauty of the world troubles him because he wants Ruth to share it. His first impulse is to describe the scenes to her; then the creative urge widens, and he imagines recreating them for a larger audience.

That expansion becomes the decision itself. Martin wants to write poetry and prose, fiction and description, and plays on the scale of Shakespeare. He pictures writers as giants of the world, finer in his estimation than men such as Mr. Butler, whose wealth and possible public office represent a different kind of success. Writing is not simply an occupation he has chosen from among practical alternatives. It is the means by which he expects to give form to what he sees and feels, and to make a place for himself in the society that has seemed beyond his reach.

Ruth, Ambition, and the Future He Imagines

As the idea takes hold, Martin’s return voyage becomes a period of intense anticipation. From the sea, he gains perspective on Ruth and her world, which he can now imagine as a whole, even though many of its details remain obscure to him. He believes that writing can help him master the distance between them. He plans to begin as soon as he reaches Oakland, first describing the treasure-hunters’ voyage and selling the account to a San Francisco newspaper. He intends not to tell Ruth in advance, expecting her to be surprised and pleased when she sees his name in print.

His plan combines immediate work with continued study. He imagines writing while using the remaining hours of each day to educate himself, and he expects success to come slowly at first. For the time being, writing need only earn enough to let him keep studying; later, after he has prepared himself, he will produce greater work and become widely known. The imagined steam yacht belongs to this distant horizon, not to the first practical stage of his plan. Fame matters, but he explicitly places it below the purpose that gives the ambition its emotional force: proving himself worthy of Ruth. His vision of authorship is thus divided between public recognition and a private ideal of love.

Immediate Consequences and Significance

On reaching Oakland, Martin takes up his old room at Bernard Higginbotham’s and begins the article without first visiting Ruth. The work absorbs him so completely that postponing the visit feels possible; he believes the article itself will bring her nearer. He estimates its length by counting the words in a double-page Sunday supplement article in the San Francisco Examiner. Three days of concentrated writing produce a draft, but copying it teaches him how much he has yet to learn about composition and submission. He rewrites it after discovering paragraphs and quotation marks, then copies it again after learning that manuscripts should be written on one side of the paper and not rolled.

The decision therefore initiates a real practice, not merely a dream of future distinction. Martin begins with a subject drawn from his own recent experience, studies the conventions he has missed, and tries to turn his labor into income. His mistaken calculation of a hundred dollars for the article shows how confidently he imagines the rewards of publication, while the repeated copying shows the gap between that expectation and the craft he must acquire. At the moment he chooses writing, he is driven by creative perception, a belief in his own unrealized power, and love of Ruth; the first steps immediately test that vision against the material demands of becoming an author.