Transcendental Key Of Self-Reliance In Chris Mccandless, By Chris Mccandless

McCandless lived an incredible life. He dared to live in a way that reflected a transcendental lifestyle, something that we do not see much of nowadays. McCandless traveled all across the west, looking for that final, sweet adventure and ended up in Alaska, starved to death. The peculiar thing about this though, is that McCandless seemed to have no regrets. McCandless lived a unique life by the transcendental actions of reducing dependence on property and self reliance. Chris McCandless exhibits the transcendental key of reducing dependence on property in Chapter Twelve on page eighty-six. In the chapter, Krakauer states that McCandless chose to live in a bare, spartan room while in college. This action correlates to the above-mentioned key …show more content…
During this chapter, Westerberg describes McCandless. “He was the hardest worker I’ve ever seen. Didn’t matter what it was, he’d do it…. It was almost like a moral thing for him. He set pretty high standards for himself.” This relates to the transcendental key of self-reliance because McCandless chose to rely on himself to complete the work to the best of his ability, when he could have just lounged around like every other hitchhiker that Westerberg picked up. The essay “Self-Reliance” relates to this action. In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson states “A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best….” Nothing relates more to this than when Westerberg testified that McCandless worked as hard as he possibly could to achieve his goal, no matter how dirty or difficult it may be. This is not the only time that we see the transcendental action of self-reliance from …show more content…
In transcendentalism, the individual lives too much for theirself. One clear example of this is how McCandless left his family to live a life for himself and in doing so, caused his family much unneeded suffering. How hard would it have been for McCandless to pick up a phone and dial his parents’ number? Or, at the very least, to send a postcard? It was selfish of McCandless to ignore his family, and he garnered the basic idea from transcendentalism. Another reason I do not agree with transcendentalism is because it got McCandless killed in the end. If not for McCandless’s “great Alaskan odyssey,” which, again, stemmed off of transcendentalism, McCandless would still be alive today. His death was the loss of a brilliant mind and the cause of much