Comparing Catcher In The Rye And Into The Wild

In the book, Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield is presumed to be an outcast because of his abnormal behavior according to the standards that society has set for him. However unlike him, Chris McCandless from the movie, Into the Wild film, was the definition of normal, but only till his graduation from Emory University as a top student and athlete. After graduation, Chris McCandless gave up his mortal possessions to charity, ridding himself of the constraints that life has brought him, including his money, his degree and I. D. This was further accentuated when he burned the rest the excess amount of money that took him to travel to the Alaskan Wilderness.
Despite both of them being outcasts, their reason for being outcasts were somewhat different because of their circumstances. According to Holden’s circumstance, he wanted to be in the same period of life despite slowly growing up, thus giving others a sense of discomfort to others …show more content…
Chris, possessing a wild temperament, gradually came back into societal structure, after his adventures from the wild. Furthermore, having been a great athlete and student, especially excelling in the art of history, Chris chose to essentially waste away his talents in these fields and go a completely different route, and in his own words from the film Into the Wild, “You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.”. Diverging from the path of someone that could’ve done something important with his life to becoming an outsider that travels with close to nothing. On the other hand, Holden gives an entirely different point of view, almost diametrically opposite of Chris’s but having the same destination at the