Chris Chandless: Detached From Society

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Detached From Society Chris Chandless was an adventurer. He loved the fact that each day he had the possibility of being exciting, different, or even dangerous. Chris was different in the way he wanted to experience life. He wanted to be alone and took no joy in the various human relationships that he had developed in his travels. Chris showed that he was a loner and did not value these relationships by his disregard for normal society and only took pleasure in challenging himself. Once Chris had left Atlanta he decided that he would head out with no itinerary or map and just play his journey by ear. He lived for the thrill of the unexpected. While in Carthage he met Wayne Westerberg. Westerberg said, “You could tell right away that…show more content…
(22) Soon after leaving home he would have to abandon his beloved Datsun. This should have been devastating considering the fight that he put up over his parents trying to buy him a new car, but actually a huge weight had been lifted off of him. At last he felt free. In Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild describes Chris as being exhilarated. That he saw this as a chance to be free. He knew that at this point he could completely disappear from his parents and society. He took the Virginia plates off the car so that it could not be identified and so that his parents would not be informed. Then he decided to burn all the money he had been given ultimately detaching him from society. He then explored the west for two months, “spellbound by the scale and power of the landscape, thrilled by minor brushes with the law …” (29) This shows that for the first time the only thing that had truly made him happy was solitude and knowing that he was on his own. Now Chris could enjoy the wild and his many challenges that would present

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