Analysis Of Into The Wild, By Jon Krakauer

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer tells the story of Christopher McCandless life and death. The book focuses on Chris’s journey across the Western terrain of America up to the moment that he was found dead and alone in the Alaskan Wilderness. A major theme in the book is enlightenment and self-discovery. Chris McCandless began as a college graduate with his whole life ahead of him and became a wandering hitchhiker within the matter of a few months. However unlike other vagabounds, Chris had a purpose: to get away from the life he knew and to find himself. A very coincidental, yet powerful symbol of self-discovery is the progression of Chris changing his name. He begins his life as Christopher McCandless and when he begins his journey he becomes

The events described in this book are so different from the average, middle-class, American life, which is why I think it was so captivating to its audience. However, this creates a disconnect that introduces Krakauer’s incredible imagery. This book is filled with pages and pages of beautiful scenery described by the author. This appeals to the ethos as well as pathos in the reader because of the way it displays the beautiful yet harsh locations that Chris McCandless inhabited. Similarly, it highlights Krakauer’s credibility through the research he must have had to do to describe these places. The corners of the country that McCandless traveled to before his death aren’t places that you can just google. Anecdote also played a huge role in the making of this novel. Without the use of anecdote, this book would have been just as informative as the Wikipedia page on Chris McCandless. Anecdotes from Chris’s family, from similar stories of young people fleeing home, and from Krakauer’s own experiences all appeal to the reader’s emotions through real life accounts of grief, death, and

A majority of the reading I have done in my lifetime has been fiction novels and while many of them have great messages, there is something very different around reading a non-fiction novel. While I currently don’t and don’t think I will ever become a hitchhiker, I learned to admire Chris McCandless so much through this book. Chris was selfless in things that didn’t matter, such as money, but as for the important things like finding his identity, he put everyone and everything aside in order to meet his needs and do what was best for him. Furthermore, McCandless’ fervor for finding himself and enlightening himself on the world around him was an extremely inspiring theme. In my life right now as I finish high school these next two years and then continuing into college I’m at a time when, now more than ever, it is about discovering who I am and what I’m about. This text taught me that discovering yourself is an adventure. For Chris McCandless it was quite a literal adventure but to me it was highly symbolic for an average person going on an “adventure” to discover oneself. There’s going to be things that will challenge you and the way that you have perceived things your whole life but at the end there is a destination. This text was incredibly refreshing to me and impacted me more than any novel has thus far. Chris McCandless left his privileged life as a dead man,