What Is Chris Cronon's View Of Into The Wild

America’s love for the wilderness has always been closely tied with personal values. Beyond just a love of nature, many would say the wild holds endless fascination due to the emotions it inspires and the values we connect to it, rather than just a fondness for greenery. Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness” is one exploration of how wild was a culturally created ideal and the effect that it had on America. A more personal example exists in Krakauer’s Into the Wild, as Chris McCandless’s journey into the Alaskan brush was no doubt motivated by these ideas on wilderness, and the promise of personal fulfillment. There is a reason why we define wilderness as we do, and it is a view that not only affects our actions, but also how we interpret

He may not be seeking the frontier itself—by his time, the idea of ‘uncharted and unexplored land’ was becoming a rarity—but his views of the wilderness and what he expected from it are clearly based in the same ideals that shaped American perception of the frontier. The first sign of Chris’s wild is when “he stumbled upon the old bus… [and] decided to lay over for a while in the vehicle and take advantage of its crude comforts” (Krakauer 163). Chris does not view nature as an untouched place, devoid of any mention of humanity. If he had, he would not have settled in the bus, or been so content to live there for those few months. For Chris, the wild was not about purity but about the experience that could be had from it. He was enamored with a wild shaped by American perceptions of the frontier. So long as he was in a place that fulfilled those ideals, he was content to call it wild. As he claimed, “I don’t want to know what time it is. I don’t want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters” (Krakauer 7). The frontier, as stated before, was seen as a place of uncharted territory and freedom. In a time where there wasn’t much uncharted land left, Chris recreated the frontier by simply getting rid of the map. In this way, he recreated the ‘wild’ environment that drew so many to the frontier in the first place. He was searching for the wilderness, but the wilderness he desired was more in line with the view of the frontier as described by Cronon, rather than a place untouched by humanity. Living alone off the land, without any idea of where he was, separate from society—that was Chris’s criteria for the