Chris Mccandless In Into The Wild By Jon Krakauer

The wild: A location considered to absent of man and abundant in nature. Many dream of escaping to the wild in order to escape the chaos of societal life and enlighten themselves. Of course, many view the wild as a dangerous realm that is to be left untouched unless one has extensive knowledge in everything regarding it. Chris McCandless was an idealist who did not hesitate to journey into the Alaskan wild and find the answers to life. Unfortunately, he was met with unforeseen circumstances and died from starvation. With the discovery of Chris’s body and story came various reactions. Many people, especially the Alaskans, argued that Chris McCandless was a stupid and tragically arrogant boy blinded by false ideals of wild doctrine. The reality

From the moose hunters who thought Chris had mistaken a caribou for a moose to reporters like Nick Jans who thought that he was stupid for going into the wild unprepared in the first place, Krakauer summed up these ideas as a statement claiming, “The prevailing Alaska wisdom held that McCandless was simply one more dreamy half-cocked greenhorn who went into the country expecting to find answers to all his problems and instead found only mosquitoes and a lonely death.” (Krakauer 70). Chris may have been ill prepared when entering the wild, but he was neither unintelligent nor ignorant. Chris performed background research on game and wild edibles before entering the wild. Such knowledge allowed to sustain himself in the wild and he managed to survive for four months. The hunters claimed that what Chris shot was a caribou, Krakauer later states, “Contrary to what I reported in Outside, the animal was a moose, as a close examination of the beasts remains now indicated and several of McCandless’s photographs of the kill later confirmed beyond all doubt.”(Krakauer 178). Even when game was scarce, he was able to correctly identify berries like lingonberries and nourish himself. There were only two real mistakes that Chris had made: the preservation of the moose and the identification of wild

Nick Jans interpreted Chris’s notes as a sign of arrogance stating, “McCandless’s contrived asceticism and a pseudoliterary stance compound rather than reduce the fault.... McCandless’s postcards, notes, and journals… read like the work of an above average, somewhat histrionic high school kid—or am I missing something?” (Krakauer 72). He believed that the notes were an indication of Chris supposedly being smarter than everyone. In the article “” Suzan Nightingale even went so far as to say that Chris’s story was a “sad saga of a stubborn, idealistic young man” as if to say his death was the inevitable result of his hubris. She mentioned multiple times how people provided aid and advice to Chris and in return he supposedly pushed his “superior” ideals onto them as he “cited Leo Tolstoy, the Russian writer who had abandoned his own life of privilege, as an icon of a life of true renunciation.” He ignores others’ advice for “He had trained, he had read, he had dreamed for too long.” What Suzan Nightingale and Nick Jans mistake for arrogance is Chris’s strong idealism. While Chris is indeed determined to live minimalistically and journey into the wild, he never disrespected or looked down upon the people who helped him. After leaving, he sent postcards to these people about his odyssey to the north rather than just completely blocking them out of his