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Postmodernism In Into The Wild

Decent Essays

Though elders may scold the Millennials for being stuck in a plastic universe filled with social media and indirect communication, they fail to see what we, the youngest generation, may have to offer. In past times, the population had lacked an awareness that we are now able to grasp with our fingertips. Thanks to Millennials and some of the generations previous to us, all things are worthy of discussion, even if we choose to do so on a screen instead of through our voices. From music to television, movies to blog posts, society as we know it today is much more progressive than ever before. This raises the question, how do we describe this newfound consciousness? Perhaps modern, recent, or even generational are decent explanations for this …show more content…

Postmodern, by my own definition, is untouched. It may seem a tad abstract, but this concept has been brewing in the back of my head since June when I started my first book for this assignment. All four of these works of art have one thing in common, they introduce an idea that would have been outlawed for discussion maybe 50 years ago. In Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, he describes a story of a young adult who ditched all of his possessions to tramp around the country until eventually perishing in the wild. Krakauer vehemently describes Chris McCandless as an intelligent individual who only made mistakes, contrary to the popular notion that he released himself into a rigorous environment carrying ignorance on his back. Into the Wild is a flawless depiction of the unheard values of the newest generation, as not many, save a few, have ditched all of their possessions to go back hundreds of years in human progress to live in the Alaskan bush. Similarly, although somewhat farther away from my generation in time periods, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief is also good at displaying a certain message. Beneath the chaos of surviving air raids and housing a jewish stowaway, there is the forgotten message of adopted families and how they are designed. This book does not blame the previous parents for giving up their children, as it tries to make excuses in mentioning that her father was a Communist and her mother most likely did not want her around for the war. But it also shows that a child, no matter what is going on around them, is bound to wonder what was the case with their biological family. It also displays that a child can still bond on a familial level even if not related by blood. Over the course of this book, she grows closer to Hans, who she ends up calling Papa. In many ways, Zusak’s The Book Thief and the rest of the books assigned

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