Into The Wild: Reaction To Mccandless's Journey

In the next few chapters of Into the Wild, the author continues to talk about Chris’s family. He talks about their reactions to the way Chris was living his life and his sister’s reaction to his sudden death. It was interesting for me to read about their side and their perspective on Chris’s journey because it allowed me to see how they described Chris versus how he described them. He always complained about the way his family wanted him to live his life, because it wasn’t the way he wanted to live it, and I wasn’t aware of his family’s past until this section of the story. In the past chapters, the author has discussed how Chris’s father divorced his mother and go re-married, but in this section, he discusses how when Chris’s father got re-married, …show more content…
It was hard to read about how far he’d come and how long he’d travelled, to have it all end so tragically. The saddest part is that if he had done more geographical research or scouted the area a little more, he would have seen that he could get back to civilization in under a few miles, and could have possibly lived. Instead, he only looked at one possible route out of the wild, but it didn’t work, so he was forced to head back to the bus. In chapter 16, Chris decides that he’s ready to head home after his long and difficult journey. The most memorable part of this chapter to me is at the end of the chapter when the author says, “Maybe he was prepared to forgive their imperfections; maybe he was even prepared to forgive his own. McCandless seemed ready, perhaps, to go home (p.168).” I think this statement is one of the major themes of this story, and is something that everyone could use at some point in their lives. Everyone goes through hard times with people they love, and sometimes it gets to the point where they don’t want to forgive others for the mistakes they’ve made. Sometimes, people get so caught up in playing the victim that they can’t see their own flaws. We need to learn to forgive others for their mistakes and forgive ourselves for our own, just like Chris did. If you don’t, you’ll loose the people you love the most. Another interesting part of this story is in chapter 17 when the author and some of his friends who are Alaskan hunters decide to follow Chris’s path to where he ended up. The hunters, who were experienced with the area that Chris covered, claimed that Chris was “incompetent” to travel into the Alaskan wilderness. Which is true, Chris had no experience in areas like Alaska, and had never had to survive in the middle of nowhere on his own. This part kind of annoyed me