Rhetorical Devices In Into The Wild

The only way to find one’s identity is through losing oneself in isolation. Jon Krakauer, author of Into the Wild, utilizes many rhetorical strategies to convey his central argument to adolescence in understanding that to find one’s identity, they must step out of society’s machinery in order to formulate personal morals, opinions, and beliefs. Furthermore, Krakauer felt compelled to write about the life and death of Christopher McCandless to justify the actions, reasonings, and beliefs of McCandless due to the critics of his Alaskan Odyssey, who thought him as selfish and unprepared when Krakauer published his first article about McCandless, and therefore, wrote this novel. Krakauer uses syntactic permutation to symbolize the unknowing thoughts of McCandless, regionalism of Alaska to symbolize the isolation necessary, and an aphorism all …show more content…
Frequently within McCandless letters and excerpts he uses the aphorism “I now walk into the wild” (Krakauer 69). Although in reality, he is exiting society and entering the wilderness, but it is also a metaphor, internally speaking, that he is walking into the wild of his thoughts and emotions to “kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution” (Krakauer 163). The “false being” within him is the social, wealthy, educated, civilized version of himself that he uses to mask his real identity. Due to the fact he is always suppressing his true identity in society, he has lost what he felt was most valuable to him because he was trying to please others. Also, he wanted to “[live] off the land” (Krakauer 159), as a way to trace back humankind’s roots and find the essence of each individual, God-given purpose. Overall, when one is utterly secluded and comfortable being themselves will they find their identity and