Summary Of Into The Wild, By Jon Krakauer

Christopher Johnson McCandless, a man who seemed to have it all in life, decided to throw himself to the wind and become a vagabond adventurer with no real home. Just after McCandless had graduated from college at Emory University, he threw his whole identity away and became “Alexander Supertramp” the wanderer that nobody knew anything about. Why did he decide to leave his success? Did he plan to survive? What was his ultimate goal? Author Jon Krakauer searched for all of these answers and more in his National Bestseller, Into The Wild, to tell the true story of Chris Mccandless to the world. Krakauer explains that his purpose of writing the story was because he felt Chris’ persona was misconstrued due to it not being deep enough into Chris

Krakauer was able to successfully use a mixture of McCandless notebook, his photographs, his family and all of the people who encountered him on his journey to tell as accurate story as possible. It is not an easy task telling a story about someone you have never met or know nothing about except a small article you read in a newspaper, but Krakauer was able to exceed expectations. Jon Krakauer was able to use an unorthodox structure in order to share the life of McCandless. In a normal story, you would not “spoil” the ending of a protagonist dying until the end. But in Into The Wild you find out Chris McCandless did not survive his endeavour within the first two paragraphs of the author's notes. Krakauer was able to do this because the book's structure was not normal, it had flashbacks, it had the authors personal stories, and it had excerpts from other books rather than just a straight story being told. It almost created more curiosity for the reader than waiting until the end of the book to find out what happened to Chris. It allows the readers mind to race around and wonder why Chris was the person he was and why he made the decisions he did that led to his

Krakauer was able to achieve his goal of giving insight to people who were curious who McCandless was, along with most importantly allowing the entire McCandless family receive closure and a deeper understanding into why their son, brother, friend, cousin, nephew and uncle made his decisions into what became his last decisions he would make. Jon Krakauer was able to astonish millions through his delicate and original style of storytelling. Not only did his book become a national bestseller, it was even formed into a major motion picture that was hugely successful as well. Krakauer was largely impressed with how huge the story of Chris McCandless had blown up from a small article he had read from a newspaper. Chris McCandless was called “The Hiker” until Jon Krakauer took over and told the true and largely accurate story of a random man in his twenties who was going on a journey to find himself. We will never know if Chris McCandless planned on living though his journey into the wild, but now we have a vaster understanding into the mind of Christopher Johnson