Chris Mccandless Synthesis Essay

1740 Words7 Pages

Krakauer wrote Into the Wild with a great deal of respect and privacy in regards to this issue, but years later Carine decided it was time to come clean. Mr. and Mrs. McCandless still claim Krakauer to have written rubbish about their beloved son. Carine commented that she was not surprised by the response because their parents never understood the impact they had on Chris or herself (Holtzclaw). McCandless was about to embark on the unforgettable journey he had waited his entire life for in order to become “King of the Road” but only for the course of two years. “King of the Road” was country singer Roger Miller’s song, published in 1965 that idealized a type of vagabond lifestyle (King of). According to the 20/20 on Chris McCandless this …show more content…

The most distinct of his viewpoints is found in his Declaration of Independence from Into the Wild: “Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate Freedom. An extremist. An esthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, ‘cause “the west is the best.” And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring his to the great white north. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild. Alexander Supertramp May 1992” (Krakauer, 163). McCandless was also known for his hatred of money. He believed to be inherently evil, and made people cautious and greedy. He hated materials and possessions generally as well. He quoted Thoreau when it came to the subject of money from Civil Disobedience, “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth” (258). According to Into the Wild, this was a passage highlighted in one of the books found with McCandless’s remains. Above all else, McCandless appreciated the …show more content…

For one, according to Johnson, Thoreau was an abolitionist and refused to pay taxes to support what he considered to be an immoral war. Thoreau’s wilderness venture was not to cut off contact with humanity, but involved society by knowledgably standing up against it. But Johnson does report, that the closest thing to Thoreau’s Walden is Krakauer’s Into the Wild. Thoreau had conducted an experiment involving self-sufficiency in a one-room cabin in Massachusetts, while McCandless was experimenting with his life. Thoreau’s “wilderness” was anything but, with ample necessities and close region to civilization. While McCandless was submerged into the utmost wilderness without even the basic necessities that the average person would require for survival in uninhabited Alaska. Krakauer himself says that McCandless did not go into the wilderness to contemplate nature or the world, but instead to explore the “inner country of his own