Into The Wild Siddhartha Comparison

The Look Alikes
“Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment,” said by Lao Tzu. The movie Into The Wild directed by Sean Penn and written by Jon Krakauer, takes the reader on a journey through Christopher McCandless journey through the wild. The book Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse is about a young man named Siddhartha leaving his life behind and starting a journey that gives his life enlightenment and meaning. The two main characters both went out to find their true destiny and get away from the world that they grew up in, but one wanted enlightenment and the other just wanted to be free. Siddhartha set out, just like Chris but, he wanted to find enlightenment. Chris set out to be free of the materialism that he was comfortable
The novel is based on finding enlightenment and questioning everything that you encounter to gain wisdom and knowledge. “I was afraid of myself, I was feeling from myself. I was seeking Brahman, Atman, I wished to destroy myself, to get away from myself, in order to find in the unknown innermost, the nucleus of all things Atman, Life, the Divine, the Absolute. But by doing so, I lost myself on the way (Hesse, 38).” This is when Siddhartha is realizing his awakening and that he might have been doing it wrong. He realizes that he was truely afraid to be without everything and not know what exactly he was looking for. Siddhartha and Chris are alike because they both wanted to escape their past and start a new. “f we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed (Into The Wild).” Chris realizes that he needed to get rid of his past because the people he was around were ruling him in a way that could let him truely live. Chris and Siddhartha both wanted to know what their lives were worth. The book and movie were similar in the aspect of of the bases. They were the same because in the being Chris gets offered to claim his belongings from the man dash board but he leaves everything behind him. Siddhartha leaves Govinda behind in the beginning to leave
Chris’ turning point of his life is when his parents want to buy him a new car because he's old one looks ‘unprofessional.’ Chris’ goal and what he wanted in the end was to be rid of his old materialistic life. Siddhartha through almost his entire journey after leaving everything behind and even before, he wanted to find enlightenment. Siddhartha always questioned everything because he wanted to gain knowledge. “Yes, he wanted to learn from it, he wanted to listen to it (Hesse, 101).” Siddhartha and Chris left their old lives for different goals but they both wanted to escape what they used to know.
The two main characters both went out to find their true destiny and get away from the world that they grew up in, but one wanted enlightenment and the other just wanted to be free. Siddhartha and Chris had never wanted the same thing but throughout their whole entire journey’s they took the same sort of steps. Siddhartha and Chris can both relate the our world today because our world is very materialist and some people want to shy away from it as our world is expand with it. Also, most people value knowledge over everything, just like Siddhartha