Paul Theroux Journey

Christopher McCandless was an intelligent, idealistic young man who believed that being in solitude with nature is the best way to live life. In May 1990, McCandless graduates from Emory University and decides to travel on the road during the summer. In June 1990, McCandless unexpectedly wrote a note stating that he will never return to his parents. As a result, McCandless hitchhiked in hopes of traveling the United States and completely starting a new life. However, migrating was not so convenient due to the lack of resources that the body needs to stay functioning in the wild causing the conflict of man versus nature. Into the Wild is an inspirational yet mischievous biography about a young adult. In this essay, I will be talking about my

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

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

Not only was her education affected, because she was unable to attend full days of class, but she also developed a need for drugs and sex. She began doing heroin and constantly cheating on her husband as a way to cope with her mother’s death. Cheryl did not know how to go about her mother’s illness since that was her favorite person in the world. She remembered the thousand things her mother used to compare her love to and all the times they shared together. Cheryl knew she needed to move forward so she made a life changing decision of taking her mother’s ashes into her own body in order for Cheryl to carry her mother with her wherever she was going to go. She later expresses, “Of all the things that convinced me that I should not be afraid while I was on this journey, of all the thing I’d made myself believe so I could hike the PCT, the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety…” (Strayed, 59). Cheryl’s mother continues to play a huge role in her life even after she had passed away which shows how important she really

While ,Cheryl Strayed’s writing uses ad extended metaphor to represent her self-discovery in nature; Bill Bryson depends on using similes to describe his love for nature and his experience on how he wants to becomes a “mainly man”; since this is the case, they try to portray their reasoning for going in the woods and going on difficult trails. In Cheryl Strayed’s book Wild, Strayed writes in the first person about her reasoning for going into the wild. In the beginning, the author gives the reader her present state. After she gives the reader a glimpse of her past life she starts to uses an extended metaphor of how her life is compared to her present state.

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

Wild is the story of Cheryl Strayed and her solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail. During this 1,100 mile journey from the Mojave Desert to the Bridge of the Gods in Washington, she comes to terms with her mother’s death, and becomes her own person. Much of the book is devoted to instances that occurred before she began to hike the trail, including the disintegration of her family, her affairs and eventual divorce, and her heroin addiction. She decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail almost immediately after her husband discovers her infidelity and divorces her, despite the fact that they still love each other. She discovers early on that she is unprepared to hike the trail and almost quits, but she meets many people along the way who are willing to teach her and inspire her to keep going. She suffers many injuries, but she continues on, and along the way she makes her peace with her mother’s death and lets go of her anger and grief. Strayed relies heavily on several rhetorical strategies, but most specifically she focuses on chronology,

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

In a society like the one we live in today, we are used to seeing many people each and every day. The thought of being in complete isolation from society may seem very abnormal to us but it in fact, it is completely normal. Many people live in isolation as it is defined as being in your own little bubble of people. These people could include family, a small group of friends or just one individual with themselves. This is prominent even in school as everyone has their own little circle of friends that they hang out with and essentially “live in isolation” with. In the novel, The Road, the theme of isolation is taken to the extreme as all the two main characters have are each other in a desolate world of nothingness. Isolation can be beneficial

Paul knew the importance of this meeting. He had already been in this before more than once maybe twice. As he sat in complete silence, his last encounter with Principal Sweet played in his mind over and over again.

In the book Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer tells the fascinating story of a man named Christopher Johnson McCandless and the journey he takes around the U.S and Canada. McCandless’ journey is not just a another hitchhiker who started out with nothing. Christopher or “Alex” believed in not allowing important things to over run a person’s way of living. He abandoned everything, his beloved car, all the money he had from his college fund, and his family. Krakauer illustrates the impact McCandless left on many people’s lives and explained in great detail the journey “Alex” decided to take.

Majorie Lee Browne’s personal life reminds me of a story from a friend, Jessica. Jessica’s mother passed away when she was only six years old, that is really young. She grew up without a mother and was raised by her working father; that must have been hard. Jessica probably must have been confused and sad seeing her friends with mothers, but not her. Stereotypically, people who has lost their mother or father, lives a horrible life in depression and negatively. However, she lived for her mother; she thought of her mother to never give up. Jessica’s mother constantly told her to never give up and keep going to live a comfortable life. Jessica, now, graduated from USC and is now practicing to become an ER nurse. It is unbelievable that she can have so much motivation to keep on going, despite the dramatic event that

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

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.

The novel, Wild, also dealt a great deal with the concept of isolation. Cheryl, the main character, hiked 1,100 miles of the 2,663 mile long Pacific Crest Trail, completing a 94-day journey. Although Cheryl, unlike PI, bumped into a few people over the course of her journey, she was for the most part in complete isolation. She too learned some valuable lessons causing her to grow as a person through her own extreme isolation. Cheryl’s exploration of her own solitude is demonstrated when she writes “Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was. The radical aloneness of the PCT had altered that sense. Alone wasn’t a room anymore, but the whole wide world.” (p. 98). This shows the full extent of the aloneness Cheryl feels on the PCT. She states that in a way, she had always been comfortable with being alone, but the extent of the isolation she is now feeling, true aloneness, is much more extreme the the slight solitude she often felt in her old city life. Clearly, being alone in the wilderness is a far different experience, one that she can learn much different and more