This quote is indicative of the issues at the core of McCandless’s life. From what Krakauer learns about him, he seems to have been a caring boy, and an important part of his adventure was fueled by his sense of injustice at how greedily most Americans lived.However he can’t see his own selfishness, in that it causes pain to all those who love him, and especially his family, who for two years do not even know if he is alive as mentioned many times above. It is deemed selfish due to the fact that he explicitly wanted to cut his parents out of his life, and his anger at them seems to have been a core of his need to be always on the move to try and escape them. And thus the question that Walt McCandless poses in this passage, and which Krakauer
