In Vikram Chandra’s “Dharma” and Nathan Englander’s “The Twenty-seventh Man,” the concept of journey forms the central structure around which the rest of the story is constructed. Although the two stories are contextually very different – ​​“The Dharma” is set in mid-1900s India and “The Twenty-Seventh Man” is set a little earlier, in Stalin's Russia – these differences are prove inconsequential insofar as the thematic unity between the two transcends any superficial differences. Chandra's "Dharma" and Englander's "The Twenty-Seventh Man" complement each other well, together validating the importance of the journey to story and character development using the stories' common elements of symbolism and meta. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay The symbolism in both stories is abundant, as the authors rely on readers' perceptions of the characters to assign meaning to otherwise mundane things. In “Dharma,” an example of this is Jago Antia’s “bottle full of yellow pills” that he “[feels] in his pocket all day, against his chest” (Chandra 165). These yellow pills are medicine for the pain Antia feels in her amputated leg, "a constant buzzing just below her attention" that prevents her from carrying out her duties as commander with the concentration and care it requires. of himself (165). The pills constantly remind Antia of her weakness; his dependence on anything other than himself is a source of shame for him, despite the medical necessity of it. Coincidentally (but not for the characters involved), the use of a small yellow object is also a relevant aspect of “The Twenty-Seventh Man.” In Englander's story, the yellow object is the solitary light bulb found in the cell where Pinchas Pelovits and his literary colleagues are imprisoned. Just as Antia hates the pills for their control over him, the men in the cell “hate the ampoule for its control, such a fragile thing” (Englander 257). “With [the] light [comes] relief” for the prisoners, and they disregard their own vulnerability just as Antia does. It's difficult to disentangle the disparate purposes of this symbolism, as both stories use it to address their characters' reluctant dependence on something outside themselves. The purpose of the figurative language present in the two stories diverges, however, when animal imagery is used. In “Dharma,” Chandra uses the simile to express the pain of Jago Antia “like a kind of beast, a dull growling animal that…came rushing to worry about his flesh” (Chandra 165). This quote suggests that Antia is a victim of the pain he experiences and implies a weakness in Antia that is otherwise denied in the story. Animals are unusually perceptive when it comes to vulnerability, and the animal attacking Antia metaphorically conveys the potential for chinks in the armor of this man, previously considered by his men to be "invincible... [with] his wand-straightness" (163). . In "The Twenty-Seventh Man", Englander's animal imagery is, like Chandra's, used to describe the body. However, Englander takes a more humorous and general approach to his imagery and focuses it primarily on Moishe Bretzky, a man who was "huge, unkempt, and stinking like a horse" (Englander 249). This comparison seems to serve no other purpose than to emphasize Bretzky's physiognomy – he would later also be called "giant bear" – and to provide details allowing the reader to distinguish him.