Into Thin Air Chaos

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According to dictionary.com, chaos is a state of utter confusion while order is a harmonious arrangement. These two things are displayed in both Into Thin Air, and Life As We Knew It. They can be expressed in conflicts, symbols, or themes. “Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.” ~Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams. As in this quote, order is a concept created by man, but chaos is really how the world around us revolves. While reading Life As We Knew It, Miranda, the 16 year old girl who needs to take care of her family when the Moon goes out of orbit, faces the conflict man vs. nature. While battling all those natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, and tidal waves, the world around them goes chaotic.…show more content…
chaos was also displayed through conflict, and symbols, but there was also a theme. The theme was loyalty is not always good. I thought this was a theme because when many people go back up Mt. Everest to find lost climbers, they never come back, and are also never seen again. “He tell me, ‘Lopsang, you go down. You go down.’ I tell him. ‘No, I stay together here with you.’” (page 228). This theme is related with order more then chaos because if you are truly loyal to someone, you don’t care what happens to you, but only see that the person you are loyal to is safe and secure. Chaos was displayed in conflict by the form of man vs. nature. The Mt. Everest disaster was a blizzard that 8 people perished in. The people on the many expeditions on the mountain during the disaster had to fight against the blizzard in order to get back to a safe place. “... they found Hall lying on his right side in a shallow ice hollow, his upper body buried beneath a drift of snow.” (page 235). As one can see here, the blizzard provided many problems for people, and to survive, they would need to keep moving forward to escape, or freeze from the temperature. Order and chaos are also represented in symbols. One such symbol in Into Thin Air would be the oxygen canisters. These objects wouldn’t seem so significant at first, but they provide life at a time of death. In other words, they keep you alive in the environment of low oxygen. When the oxygen

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