Within “Dharma” by Vikram Chandra and “The Twenty-Seventh Man” by Nathan Englander, the concept of journey forms the central structure around which the rest of the narrative is constructed. Although the two stories are contextually very different – ​​“Dharma” is set in mid-1900s India, and “The Twenty-Seventh Man” is set slightly earlier, in Stalin's Russia – these differences prove irrelevant as the thematic unity between the two overcomes 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 shared elements of symbolism and meta. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Symbolism in the two stories is abundant, as the authors draw on readers' perceptions of the characters to ascribe meaning to otherwise insignificant 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 medications for the pain Antia feels in his amputated leg, "a constant buzz right under his watch" that prevents him from carrying out his duties as commander with the concentration and care he demands of himself (165). The pills serve to constantly remind Antia of her weakness; his dependence on something other than himself is a source of shame for him, despite the medical necessity. Coincidentally (although not for the characters involved), the addiction to a small yellow object is also a relevant aspect of “The Twenty-seventh Man”. In Englander's tale, the yellow object is the lone light bulb found in the cell where Pinchas Pelovits and his literary colleagues are imprisoned. As Antia resents the pills for their influence on him, so the men in the cell "hate the bulb for its control, such a fragile thing" (Englander 257). “With [the] light [comes] relief” for the prisoners, who despise their own vulnerability just as Antia does. It is difficult to distinguish the disparate purposes of this symbolism, as both stories use it to address their characters' reluctant dependence on something besides themselves. The purpose of the figurative language present in the two stories, however, diverges when animal images are used. In “Dharma,” Chandra uses the simile to express Jago Antia’s pain “as a beast of some kind, a low growling animal that…came running out to worry about his flesh” (Chandra 165). This quote suggests that Antia is a victim of the pain she is feeling and implies a weakness in Antia that would otherwise be denied in the story. Animals are unusually perceptive of vulnerability, and the animal that attacks Antia metaphorically conveys the potential for chinks in the armor of this man, previously considered by his men "invincible...[with] his straightness" (163). In "The Twenty-Seventh Man," Englander's animal images are, like Chandra's, used to describe the body. However, Englander takes a more humorous and general approach to his images and focuses primarily on Moishe Bretzky, a man who was "huge, sloppy, and smelly as a horse" (Englander 249). This comparison seems to serve little purpose other than to emphasize Bretzky's physicality—he will later also be called a "giant bear"—and to provide details that allow the reader to distinguish him from the story's other authors (249). The common element of these two stories is the meta, or the inclusion of.