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Commentary On Into Thin Air By Jon Krakauer

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Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer is a nonfiction documentation of the third most disastrous Mt. Everest expedition in history. Into Thin Air is about an author and mountain climber named Jon Krakauer who is hired by a magazine to write an article about commercialism on Mt. Everest. He is uncertain about the journey but is up to the task. I recommend this book for young adults who enjoy reading nonfiction novels.

Climbing Mt. Everest and reaching the summit is a momentous achievement for anyone that succeeds. Jon Krakauer is a journalist who was hired by Outside Magazine to write an article about commercialism on Mt. Everest. Mt. Everest, being separated by camps each increasing in altitude is not an easy feat so he was originally tasked by the magazine to only climb up to base camp which was the lowest camp. Inspired by his childhood dreams to reach the top of Mt. Everest, Krakauer requests the magazine to financially aid his expedition to the summit. He joins the climbing service Adventure Consultants which is owned by a famous climber named Rob Hall. Hall would hopefully guide his clients including Krakauer to the summit if everything went according to plan. That would not be the case as the clients began struggling to climb to the different camps and was falling behind schedule. When the time came for the summit push, Krakauer is ahead of his group while the rest of his group would be hours behind schedule and be caught in an unexpected storm. Krakauer would be uncertain of who would make it and who wouldn’t. …show more content…

I really like how the author did this because it gave an understanding of their personalities and how they would act up on the mountain when their lives’ depended on one another. These behaviors and actions would later shine through and ultimately contribute to the unfolding tragic plot in the climb up to the

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296 Words | 2 Pages

Jon Krakauer is looking to fulfill a childhood ambition by finally climbing Mount Everest. After being assigned to write a brief piece about the mountain for Outside magazine, Krakauer manages to convince his bosses to fund a full-fledged expedition to the top. Bold. Krakauer is climbing with Adventure Consultants, a commercial group led by experienced climber Rob Hall. The journalist befriends several members of his group, such as Andy Harris, a guide, and Doug Hansen, a fellow client and postal worker back home.

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814 Words | 4 Pages

As the team ascends to camp one they face there first route or area known as Icefall. It’s given this name due too a large glacier that moves everyday, it also forces the climbers to use dangerous roping techniques that cause them to ascend parts of Icefall independently and not roped to other climbers for support. Once at the top of camp one, Krakauer tries to help one of the sherpa move some equipment up quickly realizes that all physical labor is a heavy and difficult burden on the body. Krakauer later summits to camp two and finds that his body is even weaker the higher up he is. At camp three the winds are very high and temperatures are below zero at night.

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107 Words | 1 Pages

Krakauer ends Into Thin Air by appealing to logos in order to develop an argument which explains the deaths of Scott Fischer, the leader of an expedition ascending Everest at the same times as the Adventure Consultant’s expedition, and Yasuko Namba, a client of Adventure Consultants. In the final chapters of the book, many of the survivors are faced with the decision. of whether or not to save their nearly dead team mates. Krakauer argues that attempting to rescue the injured survivors like Fischer and Namba, would needlessly jeopardize the lives of the other climbers. Including this argument helps Krakauer establish the motives of the surviving climbers.

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513 Words | 3 Pages

Many of them are inexperienced and would undoubtedly never make it to the top without a guide. The one unifying characteristic shared by all of the climbers is that they have money—enough to shell out $65,000 a piece for their shot at the top. Krakauer spends long chapters giving his best, most educated guesses about why climbers made certain decisions, and what happened to the people who disappeared. This is an exercise that must result in major frustration, as no one can be entirely sure what took place. Many mistakes later, Krakauer manages to piece together an outline of what happened to whom and when during the climb, but the questions he struggles with in almost every situation are "why" and "how".

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974 Words | 4 Pages

, it is important to note that the characters portrayed in this book are real people. The unique conditions and the weather of the setting forced the climbers to make choices that they could not have made in a different situation. The tough choices made by the climbers and the setting influenced the result of the story. Krakauer’s tone for the most part is respectful toward the guides and climbers, and he narrates as objectively as possible, while including his own concerns and doubts. His tone in the beginning expresses excitement and nervousness, but later turns into

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986 Words | 4 Pages

He is also the narrator. He has to battle his way back down the mountain side of the antagonist, Mt. Everest. The whole trip on Mt. Everest was a huge conflict, but mostly on the descent down. Jon Krakauer has to figure out a way to survive and make it back down alive. The mountain is not forgiving, and there is no easy path on the way down the mountain side.

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1302 Words | 6 Pages

From Krakauer’s letter to the reader, we have a basic understanding of his immense personal grief as the result of a tragedy on Mount Everest and the reason for writing the book. Then instead of jumping right into the narrative from the very beginning, Krakauer starts in the middle– the time and day when he reached the peak of Mount Everest and returned, and how eight others couldn’t do the same. This interlude first shocked me but also prepared me for what was to come. Most are unaware of what occurs at Mount Everest but this book awakens those who are oblivious, including myself. The book was incredibly informative, starting right from the beginning when the author gives the complete history of those attempting to reach the top of the world.

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541 Words | 3 Pages

Like McCandless, Krakauer is a mountain climber who on a solo adventure explored the Alaskan wilderness. Both McCandless and Krakauer were influenced by the philosophy

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672 Words | 3 Pages

Krakauer was prepared for his trip, planning when he was going to get fresh supplies, and who was going to get him to where he needed to be and when. Chris would never think about having supplies dropped off to him on his journey due to his beliefs on being self reliant, as Krakauer explains “Since (Chris) had announced to his parents that, on principle, he would no longer give or accept gifts” (20). Chris’s and Krakauer both had gone to Alaska, but they had vastly different trips and goals of what they were doing there. Krakauer planned his trip to summit Devils Thumb, while Chris improvised his journey and relied on himself or chance of others charity for getting the necessary means of

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367 Words | 2 Pages

The title “Into Thin Air” is quite suitable for Jon Krakauer’s novel about his dangerous ascent and descent of Mount Everest because it is an iconic and well written quote in the book; it reminds the reader of the idiom “disappear into thin air”, and because of Everest’s extreme altitude. The title is suitable because of it is part of an iconic quote in the book. One of the guides, Groom, says to Krakauer, “Beck was so hopelessly blind that every ten meters he’d take a step into thin air and I’d have to catch him with rope” (Krakauer 214).   This quote alone represents the immediate danger everyone was in, the trust that the climbers had to put in one another, and the effects that the cold and altitude that they had to deal with.

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1005 Words | 5 Pages

The atmosphere changes throughout the story like adventurous, understanding, and fear and compassion. The tone throughout the whole story was empathic by the way the author interprets his connection between him and the protagonist.

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1249 Words | 5 Pages

For as long as anyone can remember, people have dreamed of reaching the summit of Mt. Everest. During May of 1996, an expedition set out to Nepal to attempt a climb up Mt. Everest. By the end of this expedition to the top of Everest, many climbers lost their lives due to the brutal weather. In Jon Krakauer’s novel Into Thin Air, he takes readers through the story of the expedition, and he talks about the climbers who died. Among the list of the dead was a man named Doug Hansen.

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467 Words | 2 Pages

Krakauer wrote a vivid memoir about his experience on Mt. Everest, entitled

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607 Words | 3 Pages

None of these people were forced to climb the mountain, especially Hansen climbing the mountain his second time. There was a specific rule that the turnaround time was at 2 pm, no matter where you are on the mountain you go back to camp, that was the rule. Hansen should have started to turn back to camp, but since he wasn 't able to reach the summit his first time he didn 't want to go back down again. So he kept on going past the turnaround time. This leads Hansen to make a serious mistake pushing for the summit despite it being way later than the agreed upon turnaround time.

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612 Words | 3 Pages

This is a story about a boy who moves to a new town, and is getting used to the environment. He had to overcome the burden of peer pressure, and he was in much need of God’s salvation even though he was from a Christian family. The title of this book is Message of the Mountain. The author of the book is Matilda Nordtvelt; the book is a Christian fiction.

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