In the 2013 online article, “The Chris McCandless Obsession Problem”, author Diana Saverin describes the Alaskan wilderness travel phenomenon along with attempting to uncover the ‘McCandless Pilgrims’ “root of motivation. Sparked by the release of both Jon Krakauer’s and Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild”, numerous individuals pack their backpacks and eagerly step into their (sometimes newly-bought) hiking shoes and tramp into the Alaskan Wild to pay homage to their hero Chris McCandless. Filled with personal anecdotes and interviews, Severin’s Outside article takes a new approach Into the Wild commentary by directing attention to the lives McCandless’s story affected indirectly rather than critiquing on McCandless himself. In response to what appears to be a huge amount of troubled McCandless-inspired tramping stories, Saverin provides an unbiased rationale as a attempt to explain why so many are “willing to risk injury, and even death, to..visit the last home of Alaska’s most famous adventure casualty”. Saverin begins her article with anecdote- telling the unfortunate experience of young lovers and adept adventure seekers, Ackerman and Gros.
Almost everyone can identify with the desire to travel entirely alone into the woods, away from the poisonous routine and materialism of daily life, and into an environment where your passion determines life or death. This was the reality for Christopher McCandless and Jon Krakauer.
In this passage from Last child in the Woods, an extremely discouraged Richard Louv shows the separation of nature to both parents and children. By showing imagery through car rides in the present vs. car rides in the past he shows an extraordinary change. By his use of rhetorical devices such as pathos, ethos, and imagery Louv produces a captivating argument to fire up the modern generation. Throughout the passage Louv cites many sources, and deserves credit.
The book “Wild” written by Cheryl Strayed in 2012 evokes strong emotion and resolution facilitated by her hike on the Pacific Crest Trail. Her journey does resemble a road trip by displaying the urge to go someplace else, to use the trail to find something that was missing inside of her. Strayed is often lost throughout her journey, physically and metaphorically, which also aligns with the road trip narrative. Lastly, by choosing to endure solitude throughout the hike, she finds healing and acceptance, which parallels the trope of the open road. The story of her hike first breaks the reader’s heart and then repairs it, just as the walk did for her.
Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild investigates the life and adventures of Chris McCandless. The author provides information about Chris’ life to illuminate his journey. Krakauer also uses rhetorical appeals to defend Chris’ rationale for his journey. Through Krakauer’s use of pathos, ethos, and logos, he persuades the audience that Chris is not foolish; however, Krakauer’s intimacy with Chris and his adventures inhibits his objectivity.
“Into the woods” by Cheryl Strayed is a not only a story about the journey to the inner on the Pacific Crest Trail, but also the journey to the inner of a human at the moment of facing a challenge. Through internal dialogues that disclose thoughts and detail descriptions using literary figures, the author achieved move our imagination to a crossing and allow us an understanding of her feelings. By making explicit a nuance of feelings Strayed let to the reader knows what is happening in her mind when is determined start a crossing that herself find difficult to believe, “It was absurd and ridiculously difficult and I was profoundly unprepared to do it.” Instead of pretend be a heroin, Strayed shows to the public her vulnerability as a human being with fears and doubts. The challenge of hiking the PCT (2,650 miles long between national parks and mountains, deserts, forest, rivers and highways)
Rusty Crowder Period 2 Quarter 2 Commentary #1 The Long Walk by Stephen King Pages 1-25 (Chapter 1) The story starts off with the main character, Raymond Davis Garraty. He is a 16-year-old boy from Maine. The only one competing from Maine, where the long walk takes place, and is supported by big crowds of people.
His experiences as a child in the car with no distractions influenced his mind to grow strong and healthy. As a child, he would draw on the fogged glass and count cows and telephone poles. He believes this helped him appreciate what he saw on long car trips instead of being preoccupied and completely missing those things. Being able to appreciate beautiful nature grows the visionary area of the mind, which is much needed, especially in children. Richard Louv’s rhetorical devices in his essay, Last Child in the Woods, efficiently get his points across.
In order to feed himself, he had to devote a large part of each day stalking animals. Moreover, as the ground thawed, his route turned into a gauntlet of boggy muskeg and impenetrable alder, and McCandless belatedly came to appreciate one of the fundamental (if counterintuitive) axioms of the north; Winter, not summer, is the preferred season for traveling overland through the bush (Krakauer, 350).” By being left on his own in the wilderness, McCandless was forced to learn how to survive in
Readers are given a deeper comprehension of the land's influence on the characters' sense of connection and belonging through detailed descriptions of the rivers, bushland, and historic sites. Sadie, for instance, experiences astonishment and wonder as she ventures across the difficult terrain, which reflects her developing awareness of her place in the
“The Oregon Trail,” written by Francis Parkman is a description of the experiences traveling into the unknown depths of the American west in 1846. The story is told from the first person point of view of Parkman, a scholar from Boston who embarks on the great expedition of traveling into the west in hopes of studying the lives of the Native Americans. His journey is also one of the first detailed descriptions of the beauty and the bounty of a largely uninhabited North American territory. But one of the most critical elements of the story was Parkman’s encounters and recruitment of members to his band of travelers who ultimately play a major role in the success of the western journey.
The article, “Why we undervalue a liberal arts education” By Adam Chapnick written on March 6, 2013 is informative and insightful because the author talks about the importance of not undervaluing liberal arts. Chapnick tells you that at the end of the day science, technology, engineering and mathematics is what is really important. One of Adam Chapnick main idea is that the large public does not get the value of liberal arts. That it has no money value, it is just important.
Bill Bryson is a character from the book, A Walk In the Woods, written by Bill Bryson. The book explores Bryson’s adventures while walking the Appalachian Trail. WHile reading the book, you’re introduced to several very different personalities, some of which I can connect to people in my own life. Bryson’s personality is very peculiar to me. I can’t quite figure him out.
Through this passage, Munro outlines the narrator’s awareness of an alternative outcome of her father’s life, a change she is somewhat unwilling to accept. Munro follows the narrator’s perception of her father’s reality by utilizing landscape, placing it at the forefront, and connecting nature with past and present. The narrator comes to equate the familiarity of everyday life with her mother, the strange past with her father’s old flame Nora, and the uncertainty of the past with her father. In “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” Alice Munro links landscape and rich sensory detail with the narrator’s perception of reality, unfolding the narrator’s internal conflict between her comfort with the ordinary and familiar present, and accepting the strange and mysterious past.
In “The Road Not Taken” a traveler goes to the woods to find himself and make a decision based on self-reliance. The setting of the poem relays this overall message. Providing the mood of the poem, the setting of nature brings a tense feeling to “The Road Not Taken”. With yellow woods in the midst of the forest, the setting “combines a sense of wonder at the beauty of the natural world with a sense of frustration as the individual tries to find a place for himself within nature’s complexity” (“The Road Not Taken”). The setting is further evidence signifying the tense and meditative mood of the poem as well as in making choices.
