Many different journeys in life can lead people to know their true inner being and the truth of others in their life. Indeed, the story of a man who spends his life reflecting on the guilt of his childhood may have the same common lessons as a story of an enslaved man in a Russian concentration camp. When compared, the two prodigious novels, "5th Business" and "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" have many common themes that lead the characters to know their true inner being and the truth about others around them. 5th Business is the story of a man named Dunstan who writes a biography written to the principal of his school to explain the guilt he faced as a child and how it affected his entire life until retirement. On the other hand, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is about the daily routine of a man named Ivan; a prisoner in a Russian concentration camp who faces harsh living conditions and daily abuse. Both men have completely different lives but both learn the same truths about themselves and the people around them. This can be seen in the three main themes of each book; Illusion versus reality, rebirth and self-realization. We can see the characters learning from the first theme, illusion versus reality, distinctly in the novel “5th Business”. We first see this in the relationship between Leola and Percy. Leola shows Percy that she feels love for him when in reality she is having an affair for Percy's money. On the other hand, Percy acts as if he is in love with Leola even though she is unintelligent and unsuitable for him. He is attracted to her beauty and not her personality, causing the relationship to collapse. Secondly, Dunstan comes to understand the way society views… the medium of paper… jobs (chores). If this is looked at from a psychoanalytic lens, we can see that the degradation of prisoners leads them to have lower self-esteem and not have the ability to see their own worth. Finally, the third theme "self-realization" becomes the main theme throughout the two novels. The protagonist Dunstan spends his life discovering who he really is… Paul follows the same journey and realizes that he is not who he thought he was. He never felt part of his city because he was constantly bullied. He traveled the world and finally found the city and the people he knew he was meant to hang out with. In comparison, we see this theme again in "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", we see Ivan discover his inner self and realize that he is much more than what the prison guards forced him to think of himself. He had the mentality of being weak and