Essay #2

Charles Tewalt
Wayne Berg
English 121W-12
Essay 2
A Response to Question 5
This essay is going to be a comparison and analysis of the four readings our class has completed. These literary works were composed by three individuals; Jon Krakauer, Jorge Borges, and Wallace Stevens. These men used similar story lines to express mans’ underlying need to define life for themselves. Their artful use of metaphors imply a far deeper meaning than what is seen upon the first reading of any of these works. Of the two poems and two short stories analyzed in class there is this main underlying theme of a search for meaning. The adventure that is undertaken to find this meaning is what makes each of these pieces so different.
Jorge Borges presented two of the four works, one each of a poem and a short story. Both of Borges works carry very similar themes and I will compare his poem, Break of Day, to Wallace Stevens’ poem, The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain. Borges’ short story, The Circular Ruins, will be compared to Jon Krakauer’s short story, Into the Wild. This is the best way to contrast and compare these works, by grouping them in their respective genres.
In Borges short story The Circular Ruins, his character is an old man who canoes deep into a jungle to a weathered and worn ancient temple. In this setting the old man devotes himself to sleeping up to twenty hours day. His goal is to dream a human in such detail that it may walk the Earth as a mortal would. In this quest the man comes into a road block that he overcomes to eventually see his quest become reality. In a twist, at the
end of the story, the old man realizes that he too is nothing more than a dream of someone else. This ‘dream is our reality’ idea is what underlines Jorge Borges writings. His expression of this idea lends us all to question the way we each perceive our understanding of the world. The quest this old man went on was not a far departure from Chris McCandless’ journey to find his reality. Jon Krakauer wrote of the journey Chris McCandless went on in his book Into The Wild. The main characters of these two stories both set out to find an environment that suited there quest. Both men found themselves in long forgotten places of solitude in which they prepared themselves to find the answers to their questions. This need for solitude in order to gain the perspective they each desired shows that the fruits of their quests were within themselves, they just needed to be alone to discover the truth that lies within each of these characters.
Wallace Stevens’ The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain, and Jorge Borges’ Break of Day poem are in essence views on the perspective of life. Stevens expresses a way to gain perspective by the continual struggle to find the place that fits you not a place you should fit. Once there you can rest and appreciate the fruits of your struggle. Borges takes a different approach to show the reader a radical approach to the view of the world. In Borges’ poem Break of Day, he stresses that the world is just a collection of random dreams and that in the dawn, dreamers are few and the world as we know it is most venerable. This rather deep and complicated concept is more a metaphor of his infatuation with the Zen like state the mind is in during a dream. These two poems show a rather strong need to describe life’s meaning in words.
All three authors not only want to express their views on life, struggle, and the
journey to explain their inner questions. They all provide us (the audience) with clues that help us to question what we accept and sometimes, even the courage to search for our own purpose in this life. These literary works do not offer answers only ideas, leaving us to ponder; if the meaning of life really does lie in these works alone, or, are they really in the mind of the reader?