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.
The first reason that I believe drove McCandless into the wild was the emotional damage from his parents.
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Mainly because of his father. For example, in chapter 14 and 15 of “Into The Wild” By Jon Krakauer, he discuss how simliar him and McCandlesss were alike. Krakauer and McCandless was similar in a way when it came to both of their fathers’. They both rebel against their fathers and ended up going on an adventure. A quote from Krakauer I perceive how they both felt about the expectations their fathers wanted of them; “but I was not a clone of my father… Instead, I felt oppressed by the old man’s expectations.. The revelation that he was merely human, and frightfully, so beyond my power to forgive (148 Krakauer ).” And how McCandless could not accept how his father wanted to used money to get Chris to be someone that he is not or control him. Another example for the distaste towards authority, “Like McCandless, figures of male authority aroused in me a confusing medley of cork fury and a hunger to please... If something captured undisciplined imagination, I pursued it with a zeal bordering on a obsession, and from the age of 17 until my late twenties... (134 Krakauer