Summary Of Into The Wild By Jon Krakauer

Jon Krakauer's Into The WIld glorifies the journey of a young man, Chris McCandless. In efforts to make his life better by living in solitude, McCandless traveled all across America for two years exploring all different places to find a challenging, yet hospitable, place for him to leave. Chris took this step in his life to escape family issues and harassment and successfully lived for two years as Alex McCandless traveling through the West, South, and making his way to the Alaskan wilderness where he unfortunately faced his downfall. In August of 1992 on the Alaskan Stampede trail, Chris died of starvation, and Krakauer tracked his footsteps and journey after three years to understand Chris as person and why he made the decisions he made.

Some would argue that Chris McCandless was a reckless young man who made irrational decisions in life, however Jon Krakauer justifies his craziness by showing how Chris made an effort to be self reliant through his journey. By relying on his own powers and abilities to survive, Chris wanted to be independent and live completely on his own rather than being dependent on his family or the people he met along the way. Krakauer added a part of Chris’s journal in the book to support his way of thinking, “‘Mr. Franz I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don’t want one’” (Krakauer). In CHris’s letter to Krakauer, he wrote how picking careers and having a normal life in general was the old way of thinking and Chris wanted to be unique in his own way by living himself rather than have a normal life. Chris felt importance in living by himself and not following the society norm by going to college and picking a basic career, and his letter to Franz shows how he influenced other people to live in different ways outside the normal culture. In the article “On the Trail of Interdependence” Robert Moor states, “ The reliance on others involves both risk and reward: it allows us to expand beyond the boundaries of our individual bodies, but when the collective system that we rely on begins to buckle, it brings us all down with it” (Moor 4). Robert Moor supports Chris’s way of thinking in this NY Times article because he writes about the cost and benefit of relying on someone or something and even though it may seem easy in the beginning, it might never stay that way. At the end of the say, it is always a good idea to be independent and not rely on anyone else because only you can control yourself and know your limits. I think one of Chris’s main purpose in embarking on this journey was to become more self-reliant and learn to