Chris Mccandless: Idealization Or The Truth?

Chris McCandless was a complex, if not contradictory person. He was warm and friendly towards others, yet he avoided long-term relationships with those he met on his journey. Also, he was strongly independent, yet graciously accepted rides as a hitchhiker. Chris was also a paradox in that he was ashamed of his wealth, yet was successful at making a profit. However, Chris was above all, a sojourner. He sought to live apart from human civilization, apart from government authority, and liberated from a life that was dependent on a multitude of material possessions.

Not only did Chris McCandless sacrifice so much for the future that he wanted, but he remained focus on his goal and he never ever regretted a minute of it. Even close to his death he was always smiling in the pictures he took and he never looked for a way out. He came into the wild and learned to be one with it. He respected it and learned from it all while staying at his peak of happiness. Chris McCandless’ did not necessarily have a bad life, but it was clear that he was not always happy. When he was truly happiest, he was alone. His disapproval of modern day society is evident throughout the book; “I told him ‘Man, you gotta have money to get along in this world’ but he wouldn’t take it” (46). He realized he needed to be separated from these people and live on his own. He decided to change his course for the future into an isolated lifestyle all without notice to the people that loved him. He was set up for a great life, but he ended it all to follow his dreams and fulfill his purpose. Not

Chris McCandless was a hero to many people throughout his life and he was often considered a hero to most. But, a lot of people criticized his errors along the journey. When Chris died, his impact on society was mostly positive, and the people who he met remembered his accomplishments that he has made in their life. His passing let people remember him for what he has done to help others along the way. His mistakes and flaws added up from the first day he started this path of life. Throughout the story, Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer, Chris McCandless is claimed to be a hero by many of the few he met across his journey to Alaska. However, a

“Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.” This is not only a quote by Charles Spurgeon but a philosophy that I have been trying to live by my entire life. This quote fits perfectly into this prompt because it explains how Chris was a fool. Undeniably, Chris was very knowledgeable, he graduated from one of the top universities in the country maintaining an A grade in his classes. But as the quote reads, many people know a lot and that’s what makes them fools, using knowledge for the right purpose gives someone wisdom. Essentially the quote conveys that the implementation of knowledge separates the fools from the wise. Instead of using his knowledge to help society Chris decided that he had enough of society and wanted to live on his own. Hence, Chris McCandless is a fool because he went into the wild alone and unprepared, he didn’t have knowledge of how to survive in the wilderness alone, and his personality features lead him to his death.

Teenagers and a lot of young adults have commit in a lot of adventures by going into the wilderness, in which they are seeking of high risk and freedom. Krakauer an American writer and mountaineer, who is the author of best-selling non-fiction books wrote this book about Christopher Johnson McCandless and he talked about how he believed that he died by a simple mistake that he made in the wilderness of Alaska. Jon Krakauer tried to communicate to a special audience which narrowed down some of his techniques that he used and still manages to keep McCandless as a special human which is a big accomplishment for him. In this essay I'm going to use the writing of Krakauer to show how he trying to make us believe that Chris was like any other person and that he died because of a simple mistake.

     Chris McCandless to me was a very intelligent but stubborn man. He didn’t care about how his family felt. All along his quest to the stampede trail Chris was kind to strangers and others but neglected the fact that his family back home worried about him. In the end Chris became at one with nature but realized that his surroundings (meaning family

In the novel, Into the wild, author Jon Krakauer follows the journey of Chris McCandless. Chris McCandless is a twenty-four year's old boy who graduated from college when he decides to leave his family to go into the wilderness. Although Chris McCandless’s journey proves fatal, he lives on through the ongoing debate whether he was ignorant or not. According to the article, “The beatification of Chris McCandless”, Medrid shares the feelings of many readers who believe McCandless was selfish, arrogant, and ignorant. However, Chris McCandless was not what people thought of.

Krakauer believes that Chris McCandless had a good reason on why he wanted to venture into the wild. Krakauer sees many similarities between himself and McCandless. One of these similarities is the relationships they had between themselves and their own fathers. Krakauer describes his father as, “ambitious in the extreme, and like Walt McCandless, his aspirations extended to his progeny” (Krakauer 147). Krakauer believes that Chris McCandless left because of his life at home. The expectations that came placed by his father’s successes and the expectations other people had of him could have made him run away. His life at home could have made him want to leave and survive on his own. Krakauer might see this as a brave and great action to take, but just packing up and leaving was a selfish thing to

Opposing the lifestyle of Chris’s parents, he felt inferior to money and wealth. As Chris grew older, the more skeptical he became of his life. McCandless’s father became domestically violent and his mother, nonetheless, became emotionally indeterminate. Chris didn’t want to be involved with his overbearing, materialistic parents, much less accept that his father was living a faux life. As an escape, McCandless grew naturally with an infatuation of the wilderness. That being said, he loved what he saw and he felt as though sequestering himself from what was obviously given to us to discover was unacceptable. He gave up everything he had only to venture out into the wilderness to find a “better him,” which is a challenging thing

McCandless believed he had the knowledge to survive in the wilderness, and he had developed the desire to attempt that fate. As Mrs. Westerberg recounted, Chris, “was the sort of person who insisted on living out his beliefs (Krakauer 67)”. By letting his beliefs shape who he wanted to be, McCandless was able to act and pursue that desire. While McCandless’ ultimate death casts a shadow on his adventures in the wilderness, he was successful in pursuing the identity he sought for himself. His actions allowed him to achieve that goal, and his journey can be considered at least a partial success due to making his dreams

McCandless and his parents never really agreed on anything because Chris didn't want nice cars like his parents and was different. In the movie many scenes of his parents were them arguing which could be a reason why McCanless never wanted to tell them where he was “My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances” (Into the Wild). Mccandless did not tell his parents he was leaving he did not tell anyone he was getting rid of everything including his money, he wanted nothing from his parents and he wanted to do things on his own without

The story of a young man’s journey, told through interviews and acquired letters and journal entries, is interpreted and analyzed by Jon Krakauer in his novel Into the Wild. Chris McCandless, the combatant of his own story, embarks on an adventure around America after graduating from Emory University. When McCandless finds himself in the Alaskan wilderness with only a rifle, ten pounds of rice, a camera, and a few extra books and journals, he dies of starvation after a mere four months. In the novel, Krakauer successfully uses concrete diction to create complex sentences, apostrophes, and anecdotes to analyze the few interactions McCandless has leading up to his death and to drive the reader to question the role of an individual in society and if Chris McCandless deserves his eventual death.

One reason I believe Chris’s adventure was ludicrous is because he left originally in part to get away from his family due to ongoing conflicts. Conflicts between family members is a natural process within a family and certainly is resolvable with attention and problem-solving the issue. In McCandless’s situation specifically, he developed anger most directly related to his father’s adultery from his past. As Krakauer writes, “Long after falling in love with Billie, long after she gave birth to Chris, Walt continued his

This is one reason why he decided to leave home; he wanted to experience the life of not having anything to his name, this is also shown through out the book during his journeys, however this not the only reason why he left home. The ultimate reason why he left home was because of what his father had done. A cab driver name Stuckey whom helped McCandless reach Alaska elaborated that McCandless said that he found out that his father was living a bigamist life and that it went against Chris’s beliefs (159). This was ultimately one of the reasons why Chris left home and had no feelings towards his parents. This exhibits the hatred and no remorseful attitude McCandless had through out the book towards his parents, especially his father. However, this attitude towards his father and civilization is justified completely when he decided to leave home and take on the wilderness.

In Krakauer’s piece, he gives the story about a young man named Chris McCandless, who decided to live his ‘handed to him’ life behind to go live in the wilderness in Alaska. Chris’s decision ultimately lead to his death, and many readers try to figure out why he would’ve left his perfect life to death. In chapter eleven, Krakauer mentions Chris’s relationship with his father, Walt McCandless, “Walt is accustomed to calling the shots. Taking control is something he does unconsciously, reflexively. Although he speaks softly in the unhurried cadence of the American West, his voice has an edge, and the set of his jaw betrays an undercurrent of nervous energy… There is no mistaking whence Chris’s intensity came” (Krakauer 105). Krakauer is clearly bringing a new discovery to readers about Chris’s life. Readers can now understand that part of the reason why Chris left was because he didn’t have a good relationship with his father. Another example from Into the Wild is when Krakauer talks about the picture Chris took, “one of his last acts was to take a picture of himself, standing near the bus under the Alaska sky… He is smiling in the picture, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes: Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God” (Krakauer 199). Krakauer brings a new insight to readers, Chris left his perfect life to live in the wild because that truly made him happy. Many people at first said that Chris was an idiot for trying to live in the wilderness, but after reading Krakauer’s novel, their opinions of Chris definitely change in some