Into The Wild Chris Mccandless Character Analysis

Aristotle said, a tragic hero is a man of noble stature. He is not an ordinary man, but a man with outstanding quality and greatness about him. His own destruction is for a greater cause or principle. The novel, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, is about a young man, Christopher Johnson McCandless, who leaves his whole life behind to go live in the Alaskan wilderness. Chris is a great example of a tragic hero because he did not agree with society and abandoned all his worldly possessions to find himself and discover his true identity. In order to be classified as a tragic hero, the hero himself must possess a tragic flaw. So what was McCandless's hamartia? His stubbornness. From an early age, he never played by the rules. If there was a correct way of doing something, McCandless did the opposite. He would shut down to any type of authoritative criticism, constructive or not, he would rebel against anything suggested to him. "..but if you tried to coach him, to polish his skill, to bring out that final ten percent, a wall went up. He …show more content…
McCandless said to Wayne Westerberg in the last letter he'd ever received, “If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again I want you to know you are a great man. I now walk into the wild” (3). For 112 days he lived in the frigid, unforgiving tundra of Alaska, where he was finally able to be himself. Some think of McCandless as brave, a true tragic hero, but many people see Chris McCandless as a stupid, ill-prepared, young man looking for an adventure he could not handle. However, McCandless records in his journal, “Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom…” (163). He was preparing himself in ways no one thought about. For two years he lived off of the bare necessities, challenging himself. He was ready to take on the