Chris Mccandless Motivation In Into The Wild

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Pages: 5

Jon Krakauer wrote Into the Wild in order to inspire people to achieve all their goals and, like Chris McCandless, have adventure around every corner. In 1992 Chris McCandless hiked into the Alaskan wild. For Chris it was going to be the journey of a lifetime; he rubbernecked around America living off the land and even smuggled himself across the Mexican border almost getting lost in the desert. Even though he completed those feats four months after he set out for his adventure his decomposed corpse was found in a bus. Many people said he was ill prepared for the journey and stupid, but Jon Krakauer wrote Into the Wild to inspire people to achieve all their goals and, like Chris McCandless, have adventure around every corner while having a …show more content…
One example is “Greetings from Fairbanks! This is the last you shall hear from me Wayne…” (Krakauer 3). They start the chapter with the last letter that Chris Mccandless ever sent right before he goes on his final journey. This forces the reader to think about how he might die and also to wonder why he did it, knowing the journey could kill him. Everyone has the ultimate goal they want to achieve and going to Alaska to live in the wild was Chris’s. Everyone should go out and try to achieve their ultimate goal even if that means certain death, because to simply try is better than always dreaming. In the start of chapter three the story of Chris growing up as a young man with a promising future is told. Starting the chapter with two quotes one talks about “absolute freedom” (Krakauer 15). Absolute freedom is one of the most important things to Chris and putting that quote before the third chapter helps us see that as he grows up with a promising future he still turns into a self made loner in order to achieve that freedom. This helps the reader understand the extreme change that happens and how Mccandless only focuses on the idea rather than the detail, which …show more content…
Krakauer wanted the reader to know that there was more to McCandless than criticizing authority and denying the peer pressure of society, and he shows this by creating a persona for Chris. Krakauer learned from Chris’s teammate Eric Hathaway, “On weekends, when his high school pals were attending ‘keggers’ and trying to sneak into Georgetown bars, McCandless would wander the seedier quarters of Washington, chatting with prostitutes and homeless people, buying them meals, earnestly suggesting how they might improve their lives” (Krakauer 113). This made it obvious that McCandless did have a caring personality. On the contrary, Chris’s carefree personality was indicated in a letter he wrote to Ron where he stressed, “The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty” (Krakauer 57). Krakauer’s incorporation of the letter in his book appeals to logos since it shows Chris’s own ideals that clearly outlined the enjoyment