The Co-option of Chris McCandless Leaving the comfort of your home and suburbia to live in the bushes is definitely the ideal situation. The book, Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer brings up the concept of transcendentalism, an American movement from the eighteenth century through the big transcendentalists Henry Thoreau, John Muir, and Ralph Emerson. They focused on the ideas of humanities reality and place in the universe, God and nature. The main character, Chris McCandless goes into the wild to live off the land. He decides to extract himself from his family, society and humanity so he could live deliberately. Jon Krakauer creates generalizations and contradicting statements of Chris McCandless and his life to make him seem he was living a transcendentalist lifestyle. Krakauer generalizes McCandless’s decisions to deceive us into thinking of McCandless in the way he does. …show more content…
From the article, “The Beatification of Chris McCandless: From Thieving Poacher into Saint” the author Craig Medred expresses, “likewise for how much of an effort he put into preserving the moose. Krakauer attributes the waste of that animal to the naivete of a caring, sensitive individual” (Medred). They find it disrespectful for him to kill a moose and not use it to its entirety. Henry Thoreau knew, “it is impossible to live off the land without developing both a subtle understanding of, and a strong emotional bond with, that land and all it holds” (qtd. in Krakauer 183). According to Krakauer, “McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul”(Krakauer 183) although in his journal primarily made a list of the animals he killed, “the diary entries following his return to the bus catalog a bounty of wild meat (Krakauer 166). His actions did not support Krakauer’s claim of him finding