Wealth: the Boon and Bane of Society

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Wealth: The Boon and Bane of Society Thoreau once said, “Many go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after”. This quote emphasizing how traditionally, people often focus on living their lives primarily to become wealthy. However, sometimes people do not share this view point. In Jon Kraukauer’s Into the Wild, the protagonist Chris McCandless believes in living life by pursuing the happiness that is unique to each individual. Chris tackles his personal issued with wealth with by discarding materialist values, by escaping the confines of societal restrictions, and by seeking the true meaning of happiness. Chris does not want money at all. In fact, before he leaves on his epic odyssey, Chris “donate[s] all the money in his college fund to OXFAM America, a charity dedicated to fighting hunger” (20). This gesture of generosity shows the reader Chris’ belief that there are more things to life than being exuberantly affluent. Money is actually the least important thing in his life. “In a gesture that would have done” his idols Jack London, “Thoreau, and Tolstoy proud, [Chris] arranges all his paper currency in a pile on the sand … and put a match to it” – turning “one hundred twenty-three dollars in legal tender” into “ash and smoke” (29). The flames and smoke produced by this action signals his challenge of traditional social conformities – including the importance of wealth in social confines. Living by the ideals preached by Jack London, Leo Tolstoy and Henry Thoreau, Chris decided to forgo all the conventionality imposed upon him by his metropolitan and thoroughly capitalist parents. Chris McCandless, in an attempt to break free from the chains of a capitalist society that is holding him down, flees city life to partake in a journey in order to experience the true transcendentalist value. Jumping in his “beloved 1982 Datsun B210”
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