Into The Wild Chris Mccandless Family Analysis

In Chris McCandless’s family, one can clearly see the authoritarian family dynamic at work. For instance, when Chris tells his parents that he does not want to go to college, Walt says how “that put . . . [Billie and him] into kind of a tizzy” because “both [of them] come from blue collar families,” so “ a college degree [was] something [they didn’t] take lightly” (Krakauer 114). Chris’s father argues that “[he] and Billie worked hard to be able to afford to send [their] kids to good schools” (Krakauer 114). Walt and Billie have such set notions on what the path to success and happiness is that they impose this on Chris by making him go to a university even though this is not what he wants to do. Chris is expected to devote wholeheartedly to this idea because his parents, especially Walt, say so. When Chris was finally done with college, he had “more than twenty-four thousand dollars” in his account which “his parents thought he intended to use for law school” (Krakauer 20). This suggests that if Chris had stuck around longer his parents would have probably …show more content…
For instance, there is a sense that Walt never really tried to understand why Chris decided to run off into the wild especially when Walt asks after Chris’s death “how is it . . . that a kid with so much compassion could cause his parents so much pain?” (Krakauer 104) This indicates that Walt does not view Chris’s decision as a task his son felt he had to do maybe to heal past wounds. At one point at the end of his travels, Chris does write “happiness only real when shared,” which Krakauer indicates could have meant Chris “was ready, perhaps, to shed a little of the armor he wore around his heart” (Krakauer 189). However, Walt misses this. He only views the death of his son as caused by Chris deciding to stray from his authoritarian father’s set path as a negative consequence that hurt him