Chris McCandless’ story can be seen in many different lights. Chris was a young man who decided to embark on the brave journey of living in the wild and surviving off the land. In doing so, he put almost every aspect of modern society behind him, including his own friends and even family. From his journals, we are able to uncover the details of his “second life”. Many see his actions as an attempt at suicide or even just those of an unprepared boy, but Jon Krakauer believes otherwise. In his book, Into the Wild, Krakauer uses a multitude of rhetorical techniques to display that Chris was not a careless person that was looking to die, but a man on a mission that committed great sacrifices to find his own version of happiness.
Krakauer uses …show more content…
Chris wrote the following about his parents, “ And then, once the time is right, with one abrupt, swift action, I’m going to completely knock them out of my life. I’m going to divorce them as my parents once and for all and never speak to either of those idiots again as long as I live” (Krakauer 64). Chris did not have a good relationship with his parents. He wasn’t very fond of them after he discovered that his father had been keeping secrets from him for his entire life. Instead of letting this bother him, he took the initiative to seize contact with them and disappear. Throughout his life, Chris traveled to numerous cities around the country. At one point he was living on the streets in Las Vegas. But, Chris was happy to be alone. He had just returned to society after one of his hitchhiking trips. While homeless in Vegas he wrote, “ It is the experiences, the memories,the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it’s great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you” (37). Even while he was on the streets, with no money and no ID, he was content with his life. On the …show more content…
Chris is compared to many different people that went on trips like his. Twenty year old, Everett Ruess, contained a lot of characteristics similar to Chris. Ruess wrote, “ I’ll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I’ll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is” (91). What people like McCandless and Ruess enjoy most is being out in the wild. They want to be alone. They want to escape from society. The want to survive off the land. They don’t choose to go on these adventures and risk starvation, hypothermia, and worse because they don’t have a reason to live. They choose to hike due to the reason that it’s the one thing that makes them happier than anything else. It makes them happier than any person that could walk into their life or any sort of technological device they could obtain. Everett wrote, “For to days I couldn’t tell whether I was dead or alive. I writhed and twisted in the heat, with swarms of ants and flies crawling over m, while the poison oozed and covered my face and arms and back…. I get it everytime, but I refuse to be driven out of the woods”
Krakauer uses …show more content…
Chris wrote the following about his parents, “ And then, once the time is right, with one abrupt, swift action, I’m going to completely knock them out of my life. I’m going to divorce them as my parents once and for all and never speak to either of those idiots again as long as I live” (Krakauer 64). Chris did not have a good relationship with his parents. He wasn’t very fond of them after he discovered that his father had been keeping secrets from him for his entire life. Instead of letting this bother him, he took the initiative to seize contact with them and disappear. Throughout his life, Chris traveled to numerous cities around the country. At one point he was living on the streets in Las Vegas. But, Chris was happy to be alone. He had just returned to society after one of his hitchhiking trips. While homeless in Vegas he wrote, “ It is the experiences, the memories,the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it’s great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you” (37). Even while he was on the streets, with no money and no ID, he was content with his life. On the …show more content…
Chris is compared to many different people that went on trips like his. Twenty year old, Everett Ruess, contained a lot of characteristics similar to Chris. Ruess wrote, “ I’ll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I’ll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is” (91). What people like McCandless and Ruess enjoy most is being out in the wild. They want to be alone. They want to escape from society. The want to survive off the land. They don’t choose to go on these adventures and risk starvation, hypothermia, and worse because they don’t have a reason to live. They choose to hike due to the reason that it’s the one thing that makes them happier than anything else. It makes them happier than any person that could walk into their life or any sort of technological device they could obtain. Everett wrote, “For to days I couldn’t tell whether I was dead or alive. I writhed and twisted in the heat, with swarms of ants and flies crawling over m, while the poison oozed and covered my face and arms and back…. I get it everytime, but I refuse to be driven out of the woods”