Conclusion Of Into The Wild

Alaska is considered by most to be the final frontier. It is a land of unforgiving cold in the winter, inspiring beauty in the summer, and life-threatening danger year-round. Chris McCandless, a twenty-two year old college graduate from an affluent family on the east coast, set out on his Alaskan Odyssey and was able to experience all three aspects of the untamed land before his untimely death. Jon Krakauer, an author by day and mountain climber by night, discovered McCandless’s story and decided to write a book on the young man, which he aptly named Into the Wild. However, what could have been a compelling story about the folly of youth and the dangers of overconfidence became instead a unfounded peer into the mind of Chris McCandless, as …show more content…
From there, the biography follows McCandless’s trail as he traversed America on his way to the Alaskan Wilderness. Integrated seamlessly into the book along the way are details about McCandless’s emotions and thoughts that, although they seem to be reasonable, are completely the figments of Krakauer’s imagination. McCandless’s reasoning, his dreams, even his issues with his parents, are all typed in black and white as if they are truth, when the truth is that they were only Krakauer’s own ideas about what McCandless was likely thinking, based upon Krakauer’s own experiences and bias. For example, when Krakauer is discussing McCandless’s sexual abstinence, he writes that “McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but that [women] paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature,” (p. 66). Within the sentence there are no words that could suggest that Krakauer thinks that McCandless would think in the way that he suggests. In fact, the sentence reads as if there was no doubt about McCandless’s