Summary Of Jon Krakauer's 'Into The Wild'

1. In 1992 a group of moose hunters found the body of a young man named Christopher McCandless in the Alaskan wilderness. The Outside magazine requested Jon Krakauer to write an article about McCandless, a boy most people believed to be irrational and foolish, but Krakauer viewed McCandless’ quest differently, he saw himself. Krakauer was born April 12, 1954 in Brookline Massachusetts, and grew up in Oregon. In Oregon he began gaining an interest in mountain climbing, first pursuing this interest at eight years old. Krakauer felt a daunting connection with McCandless and a year after the article was published he began tracking McCandless and talking with those who were directly involved in McCandless’ journey. You can see Krakauer's direct connection with McCandless in …show more content…
In Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild he tends to primarily use the third person. He uses this style to both describe Christopher McCandless’ thoughts and feelings, as well as the other important characters in the book. And example of this would be Gallien’s reaction, Gallien is the man who picked McCandless up while hitchhiking on George Parks Highway. Using the third person to narrate his book, he is able to create a distance between the reader and the characters in his book, experiencing it from an objective standpoint. We see a change in point of view getting into chapters fourteen and fifteen, this is because Krakauer is telling us his own story using first person. A change in style attracts the reader's attention, by changing his point of view suddenly the reader is forced to refocus themselves and attempt to comprehend the change. Krakauer does this to force the reader to pay attention to what he is writing and understand what he is attempting to show us, that he relates to McCandless. While we see the change in point of view once, it is clear to see that Krakauer has chosen the third person point of view to create a book portraying thoughts objectively, like a journalist or a