After reading Krakauer’s Into the Wild and Henry David Thoreau’s exerts from Walden, we can see a deep connection between Christopher McCandless and Thoreau’s transcendental beliefs. Both Chris McCandless and Thoreau show transcendentalism in their actions of self-wisdom, differences, and liberation. Chris McCandless life choices in Into the wild reflect the transcendental beliefs of Thoreau’s Walden. The first transcendental belief of McCandless is that he marches to the beat of a different drummer.
Henry David Thoreau and Chris McCandless embrace beliefs from the Transcendental philosophy. In the book Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer and the excerpts from Walden by Henry David Thoreau readers can see connections between the beliefs of McCandless and Thoreau. They show that McCandless and Thoreau share the Transcendental beliefs of being one with nature, having self-wisdom, and simplicity. Parallels exist between the Transcendental beliefs of Chris McCandless and Henry David Thoreau.
McCandless has often been compared to Henry David Thoreau and without doubt McCandless was influenced by the transcendentalist movement but to compare these two people would be an insult to Thoreau and his philosophy. It is true that he displayed civil disobedience hitchhiking when it is not allowed, hoping freights, and hunting in Stampede Trail without a license; Chris’s father also points out that “He refused instruction of any kind” (Krakauer, Wild 111). He interprets “civil disobedience” as a rejection of any kind of imposed law expressing extremely individualistic ideals freeing yourself from society and power, but Thoreau considers his responsibility to break the law if it overrun the rights of other human beings and is against his judgement of morals rather than following the will of the government and the majority blindly.
Transcendentalism is a highly competitive world of the market revolution which strongly encouraged the identification of American freedom without any restraints on people who were seeking financial improvement and personal development. It was a world in which regional developments along with the market revolution crushed traditional and social borders. For example moving from one place to another was a common characteristic of the American life. Transcendentalism believed in individual judgment over existing social traditions and institutions.
McCandless’s self-reliance is a big part of identifying him as transcendentalist. In the short story, “Death of an Innocent”, Chris says, “I've decided that I'm going to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up.” McCandless feels that life should not be wasted doing what you do not love, and shows this by traveling and living off the land every chance he gets. Transcendentalists take in all of what nature has to give them by becoming one with it; like McCandless does throughout the story.
Chris McCandless was a man who made his own destiny, who seeked the challenges and thrill of adventure life had to offer. He was morally driven, and was not tied down by the dogma of society. McCandless’s hubris, his ultimate downfall in his quest to shake off the clashing ideals of materialistic culture, allowed him to live a life without regrets. Brought up in a home where his parents pushed their ideals onto their children, McCandless developed morals quite differently than that of his parents. His ideals clashed between that of a libertarian and a transcendentalist.
In the 1830s, the idea of transcendentalism came alive. Transcendentalism was the opposite of rational thinking. It was about being independent, living based on nature, and connecting to god by yourself. Going into the wild is a privilege because being rich or coming from a wealthy background, being male, and white makes an advantage if you are in middle-class or lower-class, a female, or people of color. At that time of transcendentalism, females were looked down upon in society.
There are many different ways to describe and characterize a person, but Chris Mccandless was unique in several ways. Some may say he was a nutcase, an outcast, or even a sociopath, however, I strongly disagree. He was something so much more. Chris Mccandless was a transcendentalist. For people who may not know, transcendentalism is a philosophy which says that thought and spiritual things are more real than ordinary human experience and material things.
Transcendentalism in The Incredibles The movie, The Incredibles, is a Disney film about a family of superheros trying to maintain their secret identities. They try to maintain ordinary, regular lives after the use of superpowers is suddenly banned by the government for the safety of their cities. All was well and fairly normal until their family was directly targeted by a new villain, Buddy Pine (aka. Syndrome). Despite their progress in the area of living normal lives, they’re throw in a series of tough situations that require the whole family to tap into who they truly are.
Chris McCandless was a young man who had been a part of a wealthy family and previously lived a comfortable lifestyle, until he decided that he was better off without it. After graduating from Emory University, McCandless cut off all communication with his family and created a new identity for himself as a form of dissociation from society. Transcendentalism influenced Chris McCandless' life and beliefs in Into the Wild as it strongly evoked the sense of abandoning his privileged lifestyle and a simple life of nonconformity. Chris McCandless felt the need to abandon his social life after he retrieved influential beliefs from the ideologies of people like Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the excerpt ‘Walden’, Thoreau states how most
Was Chris McCandless a true transcendentalist? Transcendentalism is a system developed by Immanuel Kant, based on the idea that, in order to understand the nature of reality, one must first examine and analyze the reasoning process that governs the nature of experience. Influenced by romanticism, Platonism, and Kantian philosophy, it taught that divinity pervades all nature and humanity, and its members held progressive views on feminism and communal living. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were central figures. In Jon Krakauer’s novel, Into the Wild, McCandless is viewed as a transcendentalist.
Transcendentalism is a belief in a higher reality, knowledge, and an experience that is only achieved by humans. Also, it suggests that every individual is capable of discovering their higher truth. One way to figure this is by non-conformity which means that they fail or refuse to follow the rules as while as with established customs, attitudes or ideas. In “Into the Wild”, “Stride Toward Freedom” and Monster Inc we can all see the trait non-conformity. “Into the Wild” is about a 24-year-old man named Christopher Johnson McCandless and how one day he decided that he had enough with society.
Henry David Thoreau is one of the primary promoters of the transcendentalist movement and has been inspiring people to take on the transcendentalist lifestyle ever since the mid 1800’s. Mccandless was an admirer of Henry’s philosophy but he wasn’t as fully immersed in his work and ideals as Thoreau was to his own. His intentions were not as closely aligned to the movement as Thoreau’s and the difference between these icons are clearly visible. Self reliance is one of the most significant components of the transcendentalism movement that Henry David Thoreau contributed to in his literary career. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” - (taken from Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden”).
The Transcendentalists believed that greatness was not achieved through following others, but that a person must be an individual to “transcend” everyone else. To sum up, Transcendentalists believed in not conforming to
Transcendentalism, a philosophical and social movement, demonstrated how divinity spreads through all nature and humanity. One of the main ideals of transcendentalism, living simply and independently, define as the principle. In matters of financial and interpersonal relations, independence projects as more valuable than neediness. Henry david Thoreau elaborates on these transcendentalist ideals when he travels into the woods and writes an essay.
