Zenzy Levine
At the end of the world that is known by most of mankind begins a cruder, unalloyed environment. This was the harsh landscape that Chris McCandless craved. Raised in a polite suburb outside of Washington, DC, McCandless was never comfortable in his stifling family home. As soon as he graduated college Chris McCandless was gone with the wind, dropping out of communication with his family at the drop of his Oxford cap. McCandless never found much contentment in the company of others, and idealized finding solace alone in the wilderness. Eddie Vedder captures the desire that Chris had to migrate using attentive music and deliberate lyrical choices, as McCandless leaves everything familiar in search of a place he could be free from oppression. …show more content…
Eddie uses the lyrics to provide a background on Chris McCandless’s opposition to wealth and possession, two things which he found adverse, as shown in the verse where Vedder sings “Empty pockets will/ Allow a greater/ Sense of wealth.” McCandless set out on his odyssey in search of freedom in solitude, as Jon Krakauer, the author of the book Into the Wild, writes “At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers.” McCandless was miserable in his home life and longed for solitude and adventure, and although he missed certain aspects of his youthhood, he never expressed any noticeable regret at having left. Eddie Vedder conveyed many of these notions in the final lyrics of the song, where he sings “A world begins where the road ends/ Watch me leave it all behind.” The entirety of Far Behind is sung by Eddie Vedder in the voice of Chris McCandless, using first person, but many other literary devices were also used in the writing of this