Analysis Of Chris Mccandless In Into The Wild, By Jon Krakauer

Transcendentalism is a movement from the early 1900s, that focuses on the pursuit of knowledge rather than possessions and intimacy. Henry David Thoreau was a major activist for transcendentalism and lived in the woods for a majority of his life. Chris McCandless, more commonly known by Alex from people who picked him up on the streets, followed this idea of transcendentalism while traveling through the American Northwest and Alaska. Into the Wild, written by Jon Krakauer, follows all of McCandless’ voyages throughout his few years off the grid. Chris’s adventures shaped him and his isolation led him to realise what was really important to him. Through isolation, Chris helped to reinvent himself with ideas that are important to him such as

McCandless came from an upper middle class family. His father had a good job at NASA that allowed the family to move to the nation's capital of Washington D.C when he was a teenager. He had a big family consisting of one full sister and 6 step siblings so it was a mystery to his friends why he would drop his college education from Emory University, donate twenty four thousands dollars of “his college fund to OXFAM” and proceed to burn all the cash he in order to move off the grid for the rest of his life (Krakauer 31). After burning his money, he ditches his car and travels the Mojave Desert on foot with a few guns, a bag of rice and a few smaller miscellaneous items that all can fit in his backpack. Chris’s ability to take risks is allowed him to “invent an utterly new life for himself” in the wilderness away from his family (Krakauer 23). Chris’s intent of unfiltered experiences in the Alaskan wilderness led him to reinvent himself, even going as far as to change his name to Alex. Chris’s ideals of transcendentalism jumpstarts his rejection to material matter and leads him to make memories in ways other than material possessions. He believes “that the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent”(Krakauer 37). Unfortunately his idea

As a kid he had many good friends yet spent lots of time alone in nature. Chris went from state to state hitchhiking to wherever he was inclined to go. When hitchhiking he endured as a passenger but due to McCandless’ loving personality he left the car as a friend. He continued to keep in touch with all the people who picked him up and talked to them every month or two. Despite the close relationship he had with people he just met, he “had fled the claustrophobic confines of his family” (Krakauer 87). Chris’s claustrophobic feeling led him to reevaluate his life and leave his family in the past. Chris was stubborn yet mature and “tended to see things in black and white” even from a young age (Krakauer 132). Chis knew what he wanted and he would get it any way he could. The risk of this was often much greater than the reward. McCandless was found in August 1992 weighing only sixty-seven pounds due to the malnutrition that took over his body in his last few