An Analysis Of Mccandless In 'Into The Wild'

Chapter nine, about halfway through the novel, is a discussion of the life of a man who closely paralleled McCandless in his passion and lifestyle. Krakauer opens the chapter with a quote from Wallace Stegner describing Everett’s passions: “What Everett Ruess was after was beauty, and he conceived beauty in pretty romantic terms. We might be inclined to laugh at the extravagance of his beauty-worship if there were not something almost magnificent in his single-minded dedication to it. Aesthetics as a parlor affectation is ludicrous and sometimes a little obscene; as a way of life it sometimes attains dignity. (61)” A second time, about midway through the book, we see Krakauer picking a quote that seeks to bring the audience over to McCandless’

Yet, this summer, as I slaved through my precalculus class at Cabrillo, watching my precious three months tick away, something incredible happened. I got it. Math is incredible because it all relates to itself, like a snake eating its own tail. Take Euler’s identity. It takes a number you’ve been working with forever, and links it to something you would never expect (a complex imaginary function), in a single, concise identity. Mathematics is elegant, and simple; you just have to stick with it to see it. That night, I called my cousin, and gushed to her--I could hear her smile through the phone. Someone finally got it. Pure math isn’t pretentious, useless nonsense, it’s art for art’s sake. In the same vein, the way Ruess and McCandless lived wasn’t narcissism or self-importance. It was a pursuit of an art, a special type of art that very few other people understood. Just as my cousin pursued math for its beauty and the happiness it brought her, McCandless and Ruess pursued nature and asceticism for the same reason, and, in much the same way, they were misunderstood by those who hadn’t seen