Who Is Jon Krakauer's Motivations In Into The Wild

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Explorer Motivations In the book Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, Christopher McCandless came from a nice suburb of Washington D.C. He excelled in school and had been an outstanding athlete. He graduated with honors from Emory University in the summer of 1990, and soon after he dropped out of sight. He changed his name from Chris to Alex, gave his twenty-four- thousand dollar savings account to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, and burned all the cash in his wallet. He desired to live off the land and travel across North America. One explorer who is similar to chris is Reinhold Messner. Explorers are motivated to leave their life behind and go on an adventure because of them being the center of their own existence, their mistakes turning into misery and them rejecting the established norms in society. McCandless had exceptional reasons for leaving home and taking on the life of a homeless person living in the wild. McCandless wanted to experience this type of individuality and to experience the life that Henry David …show more content…

While they were on this trip, they made it to the top but when they were descending down the mountain in the Himalayas Reinhold was a little bit ahead of his brother, which was typical on their hiking trips, when Reinhold had realized that he hadn't seen his brother in awhile he decided to go back and look for him. As Reinhold was put on trial he said “Then I stumbled on the debris from an avalanche… I couldn't believe that my brother might be buried there, might be dead”(Douglas 1). After the trip was over he was blamed for the death of his brother and put on trial but finally vindicated after 35 years, this shows how a mistake can lead to misery because it explains how just one mistake, in this case it's him getting too far ahead of his brother, can lead to misery, being that his brother is now