Transcendentalism In Into The Wild

Jon Krakauer’s Into The Wild is a biography that recounts events from the life of Chris McCandless, a transcendentalist who decided to go into the Alaska wild on his own with very few supplies and live his life as simplistically as possible. He uses McCandless’s personal journals as excerpts that give specific and reliable details from his time off the grid. Krakauer’s fascination with - and connection to - McCandless creates a more romanticized perspective of his journey while still staying true to the non-fiction form of a biography. While Krakauer’s intentions for the book were for it to spread transcendentalist and anti-societal ideas, the way in which people receive these ideas is not always the same. Certain issues addressed in the book can be taken harshly or acceptingly, and because many of the issues …show more content…
His family had money, he went to good schools, and he had a future completely set up for him of comfort and stability. A college education was in line for his future with money put away and a school picked out, yet he decided to drop off of that path and donate that college money to charity before leaving for his journey. He left everything luxurious and comforting behind in order to adopt a life many people could call insufficient and unhealthy. He even went so far as to “arrange all his paper currency in a pile on the sand… and put a match to it,” (Krakauer 29) and show his lack of need for material belongings. Even this small action can be perceived in extremely different ways by various readers, an example being a wealthy reader saying it was nothing while a poor reader sat in shock. The audience mentioned earlier - people of higher vs lower classes - would have a similar view as these basic ones. Little events such as this one are scattered throughout the book and trigger responses from the audience in various ways, but some of these events strike harder than