Search for Purpose

Adam Kilwine
Instructor: Wayne Berg
English 121-12
Due: 1/12/07

A Journey in Search for Purpose

Although these four pieces of writing show it in very different ways, they all seem to be in search of that ultimate question. The characters in these stories all seem to be searching for some kind of purpose or meaning to their lives, whether it be through some kind of journey into the wilderness or just a journey into their minds and their ideas of the world around them. They go on some kind of quest in order to find themselves and figure out why they are here in the first place.
In the story, “Into the Wild,” a man named Chris McCandless goes off into the Alaskan wilderness in order to actually escape the pressures and expectations of society. In doing so, he challenges himself and takes a huge risk by leaving everything that he has ever known behind him in order to find himself and try to find some kind of purpose in his life. Unfortunately, he probably wasn’t well enough prepared for the journey and he did not survive long enough to make it back home. However, he did the unthinkable by surviving in these terrible conditions for longer than anyone else would even think to do and in his mind it was probably one of the best experiences of his life.
In “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain,” Wallace Stevens makes this journey for answers without actually leaving the society around him. Through his journey he almost ignores the ideas of society in order to go after his own goals and live his own unique life. In doing so he finds a kind of completeness in himself that no one else can seem to understand. Though his journey for answers may be quite a bit different than that of Chris McCandless, one idea that really seems to stand out in the two is the separation from society whether it was physically or mentally.
In the next two pieces of literature the author, Jorge Luis Borges, still seems to be in search for this ultimate question, but he brings up the idea of life actually being more of a dream. If life is a dream, however, one has to wonder why the dream continues if it could just as easily be wiped out by the creator, who Borges mentions as possibly being God.
In “Break of Day,” especially, he seems to bring up the idea of life, in general, just being one big dream. Throughout the poem he seems to be searching for some answer to the question of why we are still living this dream. It is here where he brings up the question that if God could easily wipe out all existence in an instant, then why are we still here? What is the purpose, if any, that this dream continues on? This is a question that has stumped people throughout history and is a question that seems impossible to answer.
In “The Circular Ruins,” however, it almost seems to start out in some kind of reality with the man finding the ruins where he then begins to dream up a whole other world. He soon puts time into dreaming up another person in great detail who does not seem to realize that he is, in fact, a dream. It is this person who then goes in search for some kind of meaning and finds out that he is actually some kind of phantasm in this dream world that the man has created. It makes a person start to wonder; if this person was in a dream the entire time without realizing it, what is to say that the world we are living in right now isn’t also some kind of dream that could just end at any time.