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Essay Comparing Mccandless And Siddhartha

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People often find the need to seek the meaning of life. They feel as though there has to be more to life or that they are blinded to something vital in the grand scheme of things. Different people use different means, some go on grand journeys hoping to find some sort of wisdom in their experience. This is where we find a parallel in the lives of Chris McCandless and Siddhartha, the main characters of Into the wild by Jon Krakauer and Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. In both stories the main character lives a well off life but becomes dissatisfied by societal conventions. This leads them to stray from their homes and what they know, and is also where we draw our first difference. Being that it is 400BC India, Siddhartha asks his father to let him leave his home. He wants to go with …show more content…

McCandless meets an electrician who he works for, for a period of time, who tries to talk him out of his plans. Although he ignores this advice he was still an influential figure in his life. As Siddhartha and McCandless both realized this life of materialism was not for them they took on lives of poverty and faced many hardships: hunger and near death experiences. However they also differ in many ways. Siddhartha always had a clear goal, a clear path. He had an idea of how he was going to achieve his goal right from the start, this helps his journey meet a positive end. McCandless never really had a clear idea of what he was trying to achieve. In the end it can be said that these stories compliment one another in a sense that reading McCandless’ story really brings a relatability to Siddhartha that it didn't have before. Into the wild really pulls Siddartha into modern terms and you realize that both characters really had the same goal in mind: to escape the constraints of materialism and worldly desires in search of a greater understanding of true

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