Although a journey about leaving home to pursue an ideal world may be tough for many people to relate to, it certainly makes for a thrilling tale. In these stories, Siddhartha and Into the Wild, the audiences are entertained by two parallel adventures of leaving home and seeking fulfillment. However, despite the similarities these stories contain, they are different in several respects. While Chris McCandless has set his journey on a final location of Alaska, Siddhartha seeks no specific earthly location, but rather anywhere that will allow him to realize his vision of nirvana. Chris looks for a physical escape from society, but Siddharta seeks a mental world that would allow him to escape the daily trivialities and minutiae of a normal life. …show more content…
Siddhartha realizes he is no longer comfortable just sitting around as the big fish in a little pond, and he would like to seek true illumination that he feels cannot be found in their town. As he states to his father, “I have come to tell you that I wish to leave your house tomorrow and join the ascetics.” (Hess, p. 10). In other words, he decides to break away from his childhood village and pursue enlightenment by practicing self-discipline (becoming an ascetic). Although he tries to reach nirvana in numerous different manners, his final goal never truly changes. While Siddhartha eventually obtains his sense of enlightenment by realizing how he can best mentally escape the everyday struggle of society, Chris is unable to do so. Despite his efforts being aimed primarily at getting to Alaska, as he tells the majority of people he meets, he realizes in his final days that his true enlightenment came with the people he encounters and interacts with and he could only appreciate it after spending months in isolation. As he wrote in his copy of Doctor Zhivago, “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.” And despite realizing what truly gave him inner peace, his myopic attitude is eventually what took his life and any possibility of achieving his form of enlightenment through shared happiness. An underlying theme of both books is how suffering can transform our