Rhetoric Techniques In Into The Wild, By Jon Krakauer

Rhetoric appeals are used in writing to give credibility to an author and help persuade the audience that he or she is a valid source. The three most common appeals are ethos, persuading through credibility, pathos, persuading through emotion, and logos, persuading through facts. In “Into the Wild”, Jon Krakauer exhibits ethos when he talks about the similarities between his and Chris’ relationships with their father and his time in Alaska. He uses pathos when describing how Chris’ death affected the ones who loved him. Because of this, we can trust that he is a reliable source to tell Chris McCandless’ story. To begin, Kraukaur uses ethos when he describes the relationship between him and his father in Chapter 15. Like McCandless, the pair had a large falling-out, mostly caused by their disagreements on Kraukauer’s future and later worsened by “long-held family secrets that came to light”.

He states, “As a young man, I was unlike McCandless in many important regards; most notably, I possessed neither his intellect nor his lofty ideals. But I believe we were similarly affected by the skewed relationships we had with our fathers”. Along with this, ethos also comes into play when he tells the reader about his time in Alaska and their shared appreciation, or almost problematic infatuation, for nature. “If something captured my undisciplined imagination, I pursued it with a zeal bordering on obsession, and from the age of seventeen until my late twenties that something was mountain climbing,” says