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The Significance Of Philosophy In Into The Wild, By Jon Krakauer

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What is a philosophy? What makes one philosophy more unique than another, one more valid? What makes one lean towards one philosophy more than another? What makes people want a life philosophy at all? Well, a philosophy is “the most basic beliefs, concepts, and attitudes of an individual or group,” (Merriamwebster.com). With that in mind, people want a philosophy to give meaning to their life, to show that they have made something from it. Not everyone has a life philosophy, or they do, they just do not know that they do. In the novel, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, it displays a wide range of reasons, ideas, and insights about the what the main character, Chris McCandless, considers to be philosophical. He has a very creative philosophy, but …show more content…

In other words, happiness is not a person, it is not an animal. The reason for that is because animals and people alike can die, very easily. They can leave you, broken and bleeding, without a care in the world. Even Chris McCandless thinks that happiness is not living, and states so when he wrote “...you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light into your life…” (Krakauer 57). Chris has a very strong point when he wrote that, he seemed very truthful in his ways, no matter what. He was always a person who held the truth to a higher standard than most things, and he always hated when people lied, so he would only be hypocritical if he, himself, lied in his writings. And when Franz, the man addressed to whom the letter was written to, found out about Chris’ death, he had “‘withdrew [his] church membership and became an atheist…’” as well as bought a bottle of whiskey and drank the whole thing, (Krakauer 60). Franz simply had invested too much time into thinking Chris is what made him happy, that when he found out what happened to Chris, he could not handle the facts. He had become deeply depressed and wished himself dead, which is not a very healthy thing to do. Franz had, to be simply put, devoted too much time into thinking that he and Chris were going to live a happy life

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