A Rhetorical Analysis Of Into The Wild

Rhetorical Analysis of Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild” Jon Krakauer’s purpose in writing Into the Wild is to recount Chris McCandless’ journey, physical and metaphysical, from college in Georgia to his death in Alaska, through the use of factual, and anecdotal evidence. Krakauer uses factual evidence to establish that he is a trustworthy narrator capable of giving the reader a realistic scope on the events in the story. Jon uses anecdotal evidence to see into Chris’ psyche from the various perspectives found in the book’s excerpts, including how Jon understands the events.
An example of Krakauer’s use of anecdotal evidence as a method of reporting on Chris’ trek is through his speculation in regards to Chris’ death. Backed by his personal understanding of hiking and Chris’ knowledge pool, “[Jon suspected] that McCandless’s death was unplanned” (Krakauer, 1997, p. 92), an assumption with

He understood that Chris was a well educated and arrogant man, leading him to be full of himself, while ill equipped. Gallien described “[his] gear [as] exceedingly minimal for the harsh conditions of the interior” (Krakauer, 1997, p. 6), and rather than listen to the advice of others, Chris moved forward with his plans. He clutched onto the knowledge he gathered from the society he ran from, in a weak attempt to find individuality, which resulted in his death by starvation and late realization that “happiness [is] only real when shared” (Krakauer, 1997, p. 129). It’d be easy for someone to accept starvation as a cause of death in such a scenario, but Jon saw beyond that, allowing the reader to analyze Jon’s own analysis of the journaling that Chris did. Chris’ journal entry describing his weakness at the “fault of the pot. seed” (Krakauer, 1997, p. 129), struck a nerve with Jon because it was written on a book that detailed the plant life of the region, making for a confusing death of someone well informed of edible and non-edible plants