Examples Of Transcendentalism In Into The Wild

Into the Wild is a book about a young adventurer named Chris McCandless. He is the main character of the book and usually goes by the pseudonym Alex Supertramp. The author also includes other stories about people who had similar experiences to Chris McCandless. McCandless was a very smart, independent person who hitch hikes around the United States. He ends up being found dead in an abandoned bus in Alaska. McCandless exhibits many thoughts of transcendentalism throughout his adventures. The first example is when Chris and his friend would go in the bad part of town and buy food for the homeless. He and his friend Eric Hathaway once told their parents they were going downtown to party, but instead McCandless drove Hathaway and made

Tonight that's what we're going to do.”

Hathaway told reporters that McCandless always spoke out against poverty and racial oppression in South Africa. During his senior year, he tried convincing Eric Hathaway to go to South Africa and join the fight against racial oppression. McCandless became obsessed with the idea and told his friends his plans to smuggle weapons into the country. When people would try and argue with him about going to Africa, but he just said,

“I guess you don’t care about doing the right

After the whole moose incident passed, McCandless began to read and highlight passages from Thoreau's Walden. In the chapter titled “Higher Laws”, McCandless seemed to really take the passages to heart. In the chapter, Thoreau goes deep and writes about the morality of eating. McCandless highlighted many ideas in this chapter. Essay that most relates to this idea is Henry David Thoreau's “Walden”. All of the ideas McCandless exhibited during his Alaskan adventure seem to be based on the essay. Since he highlighted passages from “Walden”, that probably means he learned these ideas from it, or he really enjoys the essay because he related to it when he first read