Humans have always been bothered about death. Myths and legends abound in nearly every human civilization that has ever existed about what happens to us after we die. Some say paradise awaits, others are less optimistic. Some may even claim that nothing happens at all, that after we die, our consciousness ceases to exist entirely - like it was before we were born. Neither Sophie’s World nor “As the Waves Make Toward the Pebbled Shore” make definitive claims about this quandary, but they offer answers to the bigger question it raises - what is the meaning of life? The two works’ tone in handling this question is considerably different at times, but the parallel between their themes is distinct. Alberto Knox and Sophie often have conversations about what life is and how it is that philosophers are meant to derive life’s meaning from their surroundings. Knox explains the futility of this activity with the metaphor of a rabbit being pulled out of a magician’s hat in space, saying that the philosophers are the ones climbing out on the individual hairs of the rabbit and trying to see what’s going on around them, futile as the task may be. He tells Sophie that…show more content… The Bard proclaims that his legacy will be what he’s written. “And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand, praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand,” the closing couplet of Sonnet LX, boasts that despite what time may do to his physical body, Shakespeare will continue to live by way of his many poems and plays. In Sophie’s World, Sophie and Alberto find themselves living on and establishing a legacy outside of the work of fiction from which they originated. Their fates are the reciprocal of what Shakespeare envisions for himself: he pours his soul into fiction and lives as long as it is read, and they escape out of a work of fiction when it is read