Analysis Of Wild By Cheryl Strayed

Following the death of her mother and divorce of her husband, Cheryl Strayed, seeking redemption, decided to hike over a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest trail by herself with absolutely no backpacking experience. One could argue that this was not a trip of redemption but of escape from a reality that had become too much to bear for Cheryl. However, upon reflecting over the whole process of her trek, the trip was indeed a time of redemption and she does not come back from the trail as the same woman who started the trek. This movie is very intriguing, not only because it of its redemptive values, but because it blends the story, setting, and overall philosophy together in such a way that one without the other would be quite dull.

Paul’s wife Ellen is affected also by the storm but it various different ways. Ellen is a worrier so the mentality that she has is the opposite of Paul’s, she is always expecting the worst to happen. Ellen is really struggling inside this house everyday. Itis causing her to become desperate-to find any reason to leave the fruitless farm and move to town with her parents. Loneliness is the biggest problem she is facing in the story. The person Ellen needs most is Paul and he, in every way, is failing to meet her needs. Throughout this story she reaches a point where she is at her lowest low, she becomes depressed. The mother instinct inside of her is telling her that the best thing for her baby is to leave the farm so he can have a future and maintain his healthy state but the voices in her head become to much when she finally decided to flee the house with the child. She is tired of being alone and the desperate longing takes over her mind and therefore forcing her to make decisions that are not in the best interest of her or her son. She is out of her right mind.

Straying away from life as a whole only to be alone, some may say is the strong way to heal themselves when dealing with extreme grief or a major crisis . In the book Wild, twenty-two year old Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost it all. Dealing with the loss of her mother, her family torn to pieces, and her very own marriage was being destroyed right before her very eyes. Living life with nothing more to lose, lifeless, she made the most life changing decision of her life. Strayed never seems remorseful on her decisions to up and leave everything behind while deciding to flee from it all. This being her way of dealing with life, it shows her as being strong; a woman of great strength and character. She shows personal strength, which is

In Cheryl Strayed's Wild, she gives readers vivid exposure to her turbulent and harsh past. She tells her journey from the beginning of what was the turning page in her life- her mother's death. Strayed goes through a roller coaster with unfortunate events both in her control and out of her control. She makes several poor choices, and she shares all her triumphs with pure honesty. Strayed speaks of her past with a distant remorse, as if she is looking at her past in a movie. She doesn't come across as ashamed of her past, but why should she? As all humans do, Cheryl Strayed makes mistakes and suffers their consequences as well. Everyone handles situations differently, and the best anyone can do is learn from the mistakes and apply it to

After Paul’s wife suicide, his life dramatically changes and he finds himself lost in a foreign, yet known, city. The despair drives Paul to find a shelter to comfort himself, far away from everything that could remind him of Rose, his now-deceased wife.

Strayed had gone through quite a bit before deciding on taking a hiking trip on the Pacific Crest Trail. Strayed thought the Pacific Crest Trail would help her find who she was before her mother’s death. To illustrate, “I’d set out to hike the trail so I could reflect upon my life, to think about everything that had broken me and make myself whole again” (84). This hiking trip was her way to find the person she was before her mother died. After hiking for three weeks she noticed, “I am not afraid… I realized…I’d done to myself and all that had been done to me” (122). Having spent three week hiking up Strayed become aware of a change in herself, she began showing confidence in herself (122). Her confidence is practically oozing out of her by the end of her journey (310). She tries to pass her confidence on to another person who was considering going on a similar journey on the Pacific Crest Trail. She emphasized, ‘“You could. You should. Believe me, if I can do this, anybody can”’ (310). Strayed has truly understood who she is after hiking eleven hundred miles through gruesome and extreme environments. Now, she is an inspiration to those who have hit rock bottom and need to find

“We Found Love” is a popular song produced by Calvin Harris and features singer Rihanna. “We Found Love” reached the number one spot in the top charts in multiple countries in 2012 and the music video became popular very quickly after being filmed in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The music video features a young couple living in an impoverished council estate in West Belfast. Both characters portrayed in the music video are in their twenties and of mixed race, one parent being black and the other being Caucasian. Their relationship is distinguished by domestic violence as the couple is seen yelling, pushing and hurting one another, along with stealing from convenience stores, gambling and abusing drugs and alcohol together.

Ludacris does a remarkable job of portraying his message about the struggles that some adolescents are faced with. “Runaway Love”, by Ludacris, featuring Mary J. Blige (2007), represents the theme of struggle through hip-hop and rap music. It is about little girls who are “stuck up in the world on their own.” They have to take care of themselves because the people they are around do not care about them. They range from nine to eleven years in age, and their goal in life, at such a young age, is to run away from home. Ludacris is trying to get the listener to realize the struggles that even children have to face because adults are not the only ones who have problems, like most people believe. He is very successful in

To begin with, Paul is counseling having flashbacks about his family and secrets that are untold. The author

Crazy Brave is the story on how Joy Harjo, the author, overcame and survived abandonment and abuse; alcohol abuse; struggles with failed marriages; and being a single mother. In her memoir she recalls her memories, dreams and visions that helped her find courage and her voice.

In this story, Carolina and Savvie are sisters that can't be apart from each other. “I will Follow you” by Roxane Gay follows a story about these two girls that have lived a very difficult life and all they have is each other, they keep thinking back and forth about their very traumatic past as little as ten and eleven years old. Savvie and Carolina were kidnapped and molested, after six weeks of them being kidnapped by this perpetrator, they try to maintain a normal life but they keep getting flashbacks. When the perpetrator (Mr.Peter) returns to their lives he sends a letter from prison to the girls and asks them for forgiveness. These girls are put to the hardest test, will they let Mr.Peter still take advantage of them after they are

In Wild, Strayer implemented a style of contrast to show lettings go of the past to move forward. In this narrative, the first paragraph mentions the “trees being tall, yet she was taller”. By this, she shows confidence even in the face of intimidate objects, for she knows she is greater than any obstacle. She adds onto this belief through the contrast of “clutching the boot like a baby, but she’s twenty-six years old”. Cheryl Strayed exemplifies how sheltered she has been throughout her life, and how she is now in this newfound world with the feelings she no longer has to mask. After her father leaving her family, and mother dying, Strayed had to mask her emotions and keep her remaining family together, while her siblings were falling apart. By being in the wild, she is able to let go and truly live in the environment around her. Even though the curiosity in the mountains led her to roam, she ultimately found herself. Like her life, being lost and alone doesn’t have to prevent her

Four years before she embarks on her journey, her mother unexpectedly dies of cancer, and in her troubled state, Cheryl decides to divorce her husband even though they both agree they are still in love. She is damaged even greater by her four year fit of self-destruction through drugs and isolation. For example, “The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn’t know where I was going until I got there,” (283). One her journey she realizes that her mistakes have guided her to where she was supposed to be. She reveals to readers how lost you can feel without ever actually being lost, because everything happens for a reason. The biggest impact that her story had on my life is that if she can hike over a thousand miles alone, without any training, then anything is possible. By going deep into her past, readers are able to understand Cheryl more and fully comprehend the reason for her journey as she literally reinvents herself, and choses to go as far as changing her last name to better represent her

Comparatively, as Cheryl Strayed gets more immersed in the Pacific Crest Trail and spends more time in the wild, she is able to face her issues head on and find peace. Strayed decided to hike this intense wilderness trail in response to the inability to

Christopher Johnson McCandless walked alone into the Alaskan wilderness with very little equipment and food after traveling to various parts of North America during the course of two years. Regardless of living on his own with not many things for a couple of years, Chris died alone in a bus on the Stampede Trail in Alaska. Author Jon Krakauer wrote a 9,000 word article titled “Death of an Innocent” for the 1993 issue of the magazine Outside. Into the Wild is simply an extension of that article which explains what provoked Chris into living such a life, who he was, and how he died. The author proves to the reader that Chris was an intelligent man by explaining his research about edible plants and his ambition which builds up Chris’s