Into The Wild Passages

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Into the Wild Take Home Essay When it comes to the tragic journey of Chris McCandless, John Krakauer is a biased man. Many people, upon hearing about his death in the Alaskan wilderness, saw Chris as a moody and careless young man who made dumb decisions just to “experience nature.” Krakauer, on the other hand, looked at Chris in a different way. After all, he could see the man he once was reincarnated in Chris. In order to support his personal reasons for writing Into the Wild, and his argument that Chris’s Journey was indeed meaningful, Krakauer injects deep passages from outside sources at the beginning of each chapter, a personal experience of his own similar to Chris’s, and accounts of men from the past who ventured into nature, just as Chris did. When reading Into the Wild, the temptation may arise to simply skip each of the passages, by various different authors, so as to get back to the actual story. However, each of these passages were carefully selected and put there for a reason. By reading the passages, the reader will have a much greater…show more content…
Krakauer was going against the will of his father to pursue climbing, just as Chris went against the will of his fathers he did often, to hitchhike to Alaska. Krakauer nearly died on the mountain, but stubbornly pushed forward to reach the summit. Similarly, Chris faced numerous hardships on his quest due to lack of experience, but continued his travels anyways. The similarity of John Krakauer’s and Chris McCandless’s experiences are striking, but the one difference between their journeys is that Chris died, but Krakauer survived. Chris probably had an almost identical mindset to that of Krakauer’s as a youth, so he wrote Into the Wild to disprove the false accusations made of Chris after he
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