Into The Wild Comparison Essay

Words: 1572
Pages: 7

In Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers, the main character, Josie, takes her kids to Alaska in order to escape the hardships of everyday life. In her mind, she sees Alaska as a beautiful state where there are no struggles financially and people can live as their ancestors once did. Yet as she delves into the Alaskan lifestyle, she realizes that problems are inescapable, and everywhere she goes she will experience some new difficulty. Josie can not escape the chaos in her life, because with humanity, comes chaos. Josie’s own daughter, Ana, is a symbol of chaos. She is constantly breaking things and is fascinated with destruction. DESTRUCTION QUOTE. Just like a mother should never leave her daughter, Ana is a symbol that chaos will never …show more content…
In Into the Wild, Christopher McCandless can no longer deal with his family problems and hates how much people care about insignificant issues. When he travels into the wild, he takes it a step further than Josie does and completely isolates himself from society. Josie may have also wanted to do this, but she was obligated to take care of her two kids. Yet in the end Josies children pile rocks on her, and when she asks them to take the rocks off of her, she feels as if a weight from her past life has been lifted off of her. Eggers writes, “They were just stones, and she was only sitting by a lake shushing the jagged shore, but each time her children lifted one she let out a tiny gasp, and her body felt closer to release” (365). Josie finally feels free from the problems and chaos that plagued her life, just as McCandless felt free in the bus away from humanity. When people are forced to only rely on themselves, it is freeing and as shown by Josie and McCandless, ALaska is a great place to free