Into the wild: themes of nature and self-discovery

¶ … Chris McCandless crazy?

In the eyes of people who value a stable job and security, Chris McCandless seems 'crazy.' He threw away a loving home, a degree from a respected university, and even the opportunity to save his own life -- to live, he said, according to his own creed. To outdoorsman Jon Krakauer, McCandless is admirably sane for rejecting the dictates of a civilization that destroys the land and places material goods above the value of a life well-lived. The problem with Krakauer's thesis is that McCandless often seems to be using the outdoors to fulfill a death-wish and acts like a reckless adolescent rather than a young man who understands the risks he is undertaking when he makes his fateful quest up north.

Even animals attempt to survive in the woods, yet McCandless recklessly rejected the most compassionate offers of assistance, such as when a stranger tried to buy him appropriate equipment. "He even offered to drive Alex all the way to Anchorage so he could at least buy the kid some decent gear. 'No, thanks anyway,' Alex [Chris' pseudonym] replied. 'I'll be fine with what I've got'" (Krakauer 4).While adventurers have taken great risks, such as scaling challenging mountains, they have always tried to maximize safety and minimize risk: not so with Chris. When the great nature writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau lived in the woods at Walden, his aim was to prove that a man could survive relying by using all of the resources at his disposal in the woods -- including the good will of neighbors -- not that a man could die in the wild.

Some of Chris' symptoms seem more like manic depression than passionate environmentalism. Chris was, despite his isolation from others, a compulsive talker: "He used to sit right there at the end of the bar and tell us these amazing stories of his travels. He could talk for hours" (Krakauer 14). Like many people with mental issues, Chris isolated himself from others, including his family for the three years before his death. Even wild spending binges, like donating what was left in his college fund to Oxfam, suggest mania.

Krakauer is quick to draw parallels between himself and Chris: "As a young man, I was unlike Chris McCandless in many important respects -- most notably I lacked his intellect and his altruistic leanings -- but I suspect we had a similar intensity, a similar heedlessness, a similar agitation of the soul" (Krakauer 157). Krakauer believes it was mere luck that he survived and Chris did not. However, McCandless was offered many opportunities to save his own life, all of which he rejected. It was deliberation, not chance that took his life. Chris was so clearly headed on a path to destruction, when he was found, his identity was almost immediately obvious to those who had met him: "The police don't know who he is. Sounds a whole lot like Alex" (Krakauer 102). Chris caused tremendous suffering for his family, and although he had a determination to prove himself and possessed compassion as an abstract value, he could not exhibit this in real life, rather he shunned real people. Observed one of the people who tried to help: "How is it…that a kid with so much compassion could cause his parents so much pain?" (Krakauer 106)

Question 2: Krakauer as biographer