Rite Of Passage In Into The Wild

The two movies Into the Wild and Walkabout depict two stories of people that embark on treacherous journeys that both occur for opposite reasons. Into the Wild portrays the real life story of Chris McCandless, a young man who is on a journey to get away from society. Walkabout shows the fiction story of a girl and her younger brother trying to get back to society to escape solitude from the Australian outback. These characters from these stories display positive and negative emotions towards society. However, in the end, both McCandless and the girl show that their surroundings and society as a whole has deeply affected them. McCandless begins to regret his decision on abandoning society and living in solitude. The girl begins to believe …show more content…
For the girl, her whole experience in the outback is one long rite of passage, first beginning when she has to wander off from her dead father and exploded car into the territory unknown to her, and also makes her younger brother her number one priority. Her rite of passage continues when she first experiences comfort around the aborigine, as she is willingly swam naked in a pond with the aborigine and her brother, showing maturity and courage. Her passage completes when she looks back on this moment many years after she leaves the outback, as she remembers the pond with the aborigine and begins to believe that she did sense feelings for the aborigine, but did not know how to convey them. She senses that life could have been much simpler for her had she of stayed in the outback and lived out her days there. As for McCandless, he did not have his rite of passage until his last breath. He lived out his solitary days in a small bus in the middle of the woods in Alaska, eventually to be poisoned by a berry and stricken with starvation. He accepted death and began to write out his final days in his journal and think about his life. He begins to regret his decisions of living in solitude and understands that companionship and love are necessary in order to have a healthy and happy life. He did not recognize that abandoning his family and all the people he met on his journey would hurt their emotions, and also have every one of them discover that he had died. McCandless completes his rite of passage by accepting his fate and admitting his wrongdoings, as he enters into