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Chris Mccandless In Into The Wild By Jon Krakauer

521 Words3 Pages

One of the many necessities in life is to love and be loved by another human being. Chris McCandless, Timothy Treadwell, and Henry David Thoreau separated themselves from society and did not experience the comforts of being around family. When deciding, one should consider how the outcome will affect their loved ones.

Chris McCandless left his family at a young age to discover the world. Along his journey, he made some bad decisions including not bringing a map and having no supplies. This led to his death in the Alaskan wild. Many people offered to give him things, such as Ronald Franz who wanted to adopt McCandless, but not once did McCandless say “I need your help”(Krakauer 198) until a few days before his death but no one was there. It was at this point that he realized he needed someone there because his life depended on it. He knew the impact he had on his parents and those that drove him along his journey. If McCandless realized this prior to putting himself in danger, he would have lived a longer life devoted to others more than himself. …show more content…

Treadwell “love[s] [the bears] with all [his] heart, [he] will protect them, [he] will die for them”(Grizzly Man). This is an enormous mistake that Treadwell makes because the bears cannot love him back. Along with all of Treadwell’s problems with alcohol and drugs, he leaves society in search to find comfort in the bears. On the day of Treadwell’s death, it is recorded that he tells his girlfriend to run away as he fights off the hungry bear (Grizzly Man). At this moment, Treadwell has decided that he can’t be as close, emotionally and physically, to bears as he wanted and the one person that loved him was in danger. He picked human life over a bear’s trying to correct the mistake he made thirteen years

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Herzog shows clips of Treadwell ranting in response to perceived intruders of his self-proclaimed “Grizzly Sanctuary” and displays Treadwell’s paranoia towards people who Timothy believed were threatening harm to his beloved bears and him. The director shows that Treadwell views himself as a savior and protector of the bears, which appeared to border on mania. Herzog uses other clips to reveal Treadwell’s state of mind, such as clips of Treadwell’s emotional overreaction to a bumblebee that he believed was dead, his clutching a childhood toy bear at his campsite, and his becoming euphoric at touching bear excrement that only moments before had been inside a beloved bear. Narrating one clip about Treadwell touching the detached paw of a mauled bear cub, Herzog gives his opinion about that event that had punctured Treadwell’s romantic fantasies about nature’s harmony by saying, “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.” The video selections and narration from Herzog reveal to the audience Treadwell’s complex and unstable state of

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One may say that McCandless’ violent childhood is what caused his downfall. McCandless may have even had the right idea, separating himself from his family, but due to his fragile state of mind he may have gone to too much of an extreme. He ended up taking the policies and principles of transcendentalism too far, which is really what resulted in his death. A concept that transcendentalism goes strongly against is materialism, a principle that may have saved his life. He was so anti materialistic in fact, that he refused to even have a phone or form of communication, this ultimately could have saved his life.

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Why do people still try to do what he did when it ended in death? They still see his story as an influence. Maybe when reading parts of his journal they liked his ideas and wanted to do as he did. People see McCandless as a hero in some ways. They believe he taught society many things in discovering yourself.

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Venturing out into the wild may seem outright moronic or frightening to some, while to others, it is a new adventure and beginning. Chris McCandless, an intelligent individual and high achieving scholar, may be seen to some as downright crazy for exposing himself to the Alaskan wilderness in an attempt to live off the land. Many, like Shaun Callarman, claim that McCandless was arrogant and crazy for doing what he did, however; there are people, like myself, who believe that although what McCandless did ended tragically, he was not crazy for pursuing this outing. Throughout his life McCandless was an intelligent individual who seemed like he had a bright future, it just so happens that he had a desire to venture out into the country alone and

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Many criticizers of Chris McCandless believe that he was so naive and ill-prepared for his adventure to Alaska that it was what ended up costing him his life in the end. Some would disagree with that opinion and say he was courageous and admired that he followed his dreams and ambitions. In the author’s note of “Into The Wild” Jon Krakauer states, “Some readers admired the boy immensely for his courage and noble ideals; others fulminated that he was a reckless idiot, a wacko, a narcissist who perished out of arrogance and stupidity” (Authors Note). In my opinion, McCandless was prepared for this adventure, knew what risks he was going to face, and therefore wasn’t naive about his journey.

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Chris McCandless from the book “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer is a character who is extremely well liked by all. His smarts give him the ability to hold conversations with a variety of different people. Chris does not use his knowledge in a negative way that causes people to think that he is arrogant, it just comes out of him naturally, leaving many people impressed by the young boy. Through his character, I learned how much intelligence can truly add to one's personality. Chris is subconsciously phenomenal at speaking with new people due to his wide range of knowledge.

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Chapter 18 recorded the final days of Chris’s life, in which he died of starvation and poisoning on August 18th. I chose this quote in an attempt to capture some of Mccandless’s last moments, and to provide the readers with some sketchy clues to whether or not Chris has planned his final fate. In the picture which Chris took when he was at the brink of starvation, his expressions was not solace, nor troubled, nor filled with despair, but he was smiling, as described by Jon Krakauer “serene as a monk gone to God” this cannot help but lead us to the speculation which Chris has made at least some preparations in the chance of him expiring in the harshness of the wilderness. Or, in other words, he welcomed death as an old friend. He did not lament over his early demise, nor exhibit yearnings for the company of

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Bear taught Crispin so much, such as how to do silly activities, like juggling, but also how to make his own decisions and to be his own master. This new way of life was so bizarre and new for Crispin because he had come from nothing of the sort. “He rushed at me with so many new and strange ideas that I could not grasp them all” (87). There were so many ideas that Crispin could not even embrace and accept all of them. It took him some time to transform into what Bear taught him to be.

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Grizzly Man, by Werner Herzog, is a documentary that consists of a collection of actual footage of Timothy Treadwell, who was once a stranger to Alaska’s wilderness. Treadwell was an eccentric man who had a childlike and dangerous passion for bears, and Herzog focuses on that aspect. He carefully puts together the film so that the audience can easily see the authenticity of Treadwell’s passion, and we see as he moves further and further away from sanity during his Alaskan journey with the bears. Treadwell understood the fact that when you're in the ‘backcountry’, you're in the bears home and you have to respect it. Before he decided to run off into the wilderness, he was an unhappy man who found happiness through proximity to a big and powerful

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To do so he wanted to go to Alaska before that he had to travel, work, and camp out a lot, so it was tough but he was up for the battle. When he made it to Alaska he was doing good and was finding happiness until things started getting rough. He started losing a lot of weight because of the animals were not coming out as often. When he turned to plants and started eating it, he did not realize he was killing himself. Right before he died, he said “happiness is better When shared” McCandless.

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The Grizzly Man is a documentary film directed and narrated by Werner Herzog which focuses on the life and death of Timothy Treadwell, an amateur nature filmmaker and wildlife preservationist. The movie features interviews with people who knew Timothy in his life and people who had heard of his story. These interviews paint Treadwell as a controversial figure, but those closest to him express their fondness for him despite his troubled past. The film also features sequences from Treadwell’s video footage in which he gets up close and personal with wild grizzly bears. In the end, Treadwell appears to me to be a lunatic who let his hurts get the best of him, causing him to undermine the harsh reality of nature which when combined with his ill-preparedness,

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What really drove Chris McCandless into the wild? I believe the top three of the countless reasons that drove McCandless into the wild was the emotional damage from his parents, rebellion of the youth & risk taking tendencies, and his hubris and detestation against authority and/or someone telling him what to do. Some may believe that Chris McCandless went into the wild because of his literary heroes Leo Tolstoy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau , and Jack London but the real reason he left everything was because of those reasons. In this essay I will elaborate on why I believe those are the reasons that drove McCandless into the wild.

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