Into The Wild

“It might be a very long time before I return South. If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t hear from me again I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild.”

Many claim that McCandless’s awareness that his adventure might kill him proves that he was bent on death, but Krakauer excerpts this passage as an indication that McCandless was not suicidal.

“His rifle was only .22 caliber, a bore too small to rely on if he expected to kill large animals like moose and caribou, which he would have to eat if he hoped to remain very long in the country.”

Jim Gallien was one of many who met McCandless and tried to influence him into adopting better gear, food, or clothing. In Chapter 1, Gallien’s suggestion that McCandless is unprepared foreshadows the fate that awaits him in the wild.

“S.O.S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE. I AM ALL ALONE, THIS IS NO JOKE.”

This is the note found by hikers who stumbled upon the bus many days after McCandless had died. Its tone attests to the direness of McCandless’s situation in his final days while also demonstrating that he remained pragmatic until the end.

“Transferred to Wayne Westerberg from Alexander. October, 1990. Listen to Pierre.”

McCandless had an affinity for literature, especially Tolstoy. When he gave Wayne Westerberg a copy of War & Peace, he inscribed the above message, which demonstrates that he was generous and frequently perceived the world in a literary manner.

“To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.”

Krakauer begins each chapter with at least one epigraph. This one, written by Paul Shephard in Man in the Landscape, introduces a theme that Krakauer develops as the book progresses, namely the idea that McCandless was a kind of spiritual pilgrim or monk.

“Then, in a gesture that would have done both Thoreau and Tolstoy proud, he arranged all his paper currency in a pile on the sand—a pathetic little stack of ones and fives and twenties—and put a match to it. One hundred twenty-three dollars in legal tender was promptly reduced to ash and smoke.”

This is one of the most symbolic moments of McCandless’s narrative, signaling total independence and a complete separation from his previous life.

“All hopes collapse! The canal does not reach the ocean but merely peters out into a vast swamp. Alex is utterly confounded.”

Most of McCandless’s journal entries are written in the third person, revealing a literary and adventurous way of processing the world and his travels. In this passage he narrates his long journey by canoe through Mexico.

“He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn’t a hermit. He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around.”

This description of McCandless from someone who met him during his journey helps bolster Krakauer’s depiction of McCandless as a fun-loving, social, and charismatic young man. Krakauer frequently depends on such quotations from third parties to support his characterization of McCandless.

“I turned my van around, drove back to the store, and bought a bottle of whiskey. And then I went out into the desert and drank it. I wasn’t used to drinking, so it made me sick. Hoped it’d kill me, but it didn’t. Just made me real, real sick.”

After Ron Franz learns of McCandless’s death, he renounces his religious beliefs and tries to cope through drinking. This image underscores how attached Franz and others became to McCandless in their short time together.

“I don’t recollect Alex ever talking about any girlfriends.”

Krakauer suggests that McCandless preferred communion with the outdoors to sexual relationships, much like Thoreau and John Muir. This adds another dimension to Krakauer’s suggestion that McCandless was monk-like.

“When I let him off, he had that big damn machete hanging off his shoulder […] I thought, ‘Jeeze, nobody’s going to pick him up when they see that thing.’”

Although McCandless’s story ends in tragedy, he left many with humorous memories, including Wolf, the man who drove him from Wayne Westerberg’s home in Carthage, South Dakota.

“McCandless was something else—although precisely what is hard to say. A pilgrim, perhaps.”

A crucial strategy in Krakauer’s argument that McCandless was not insane or incompetent involves comparing him to people who were. In Chapter 8 Krakauer compares McCandless to a trio of Alaskan legends who died from hubris, suicide, or mental instability before firmly declaring that McCandless was different from all of them.

“I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me.”

The person McCandless likely had the most in common with was a man named Everett Ruess, who roamed the American Southwest at very young age in the 1930s. Like Ruess, McCandless sought the beauty and solitude of the natural world, and also like Ruess, McCandless unexpectedly died during his communion with it.

“He would have made a great CIA agent—I’m serious; I know guys who work for the CIA. He told us what he thought we needed to know and nothing more. He was that way about everything.”

While most who encountered McCandless on the road found him charming and likable, McCandless’s father Walt saw in him other qualities such as stubbornness, evasiveness, and secretiveness.

“Back in Chesapeake Beach, Billie had stopped eating, too. A tiny forty-eight-year-old woman with girlish features, she lost eight pounds before her appetite finally returned. Walt reacted the other way, eating compulsively, and gained eight pounds.”

It is interesting to note that each member of McCandless’s family responded to food differently following his death from starvation. Such an intimate detail is one of many that provide Into the Wild an almost novelistic air.

“My suspicion that McCandless’s death was unplanned, that it was a terrible accident, comes from reading those few documents he left behind and from listening to the men and women who spent time with him over the final year of his life. But my sense of Chris McCandless’s intentions comes, too, from a more personal perspective.”

This comment outlines Krakauer’s approach to writing Into the Wild. Rather than limiting himself to documents and interviews, Krakauer also utilizes personal experience to fully comprehend and then recount McCandless’s motivations.

“I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”

Krakauer elegantly expresses the wanderlust that enthralled McCandless, Everett Ruess, and many other figures in Into the Wild.

“A little later I broke through another bridge to my waist; the poles kept me out of the hundred-foot crevasse, but after I extricated myself, I bent double with dry heaves, thinking about what it would be like to be lying in a pile at the bottom of the crevasse.”

The detail that Krakauer was “bent double with dry heaves” after a near-death experience is meant to underscore the fact that he did not meant to die during his harrowing Alaska adventure. He suggests that McCandless likely shared the same fear of dying.

“The fact that I survived my Alaska adventure and McCandless did not survive his was largely a matter of chance.”

Krakauer attempts to dismantle the argument that McCandless was suicidal from every possible angle. By revealing how close to death he came on his own adventures, Krakauer powerfully demonstrates that matters of life and death often hinge on small, easily overlooked details.

“After weighing his options, therefore, he settled on the most prudent course. He turned around and began walking to the west, back toward the bus, back into the fickle heart of the bush.”

This is one of the two consequential decisions that cost McCandless his life. Krakauer later discovered that McCandless could have made it across the river through other routes, but at the time he had no way of knowing about those routes.

“The boy made some mistakes on the Stampede Trail, but confusing a caribou with a moose wasn’t among them.”

Krakauer is critical of McCandless in some regards but vehemently defends him with he has evidence on his side. In this case Krakauer argues against those who claim McCandless was so inexperienced that he could not properly identify which animals he killed.

“One suspects that Muir wouldn’t have thought McCandless terribly odd or incomprehensible.”

Krakauer hopes to contextualize and canonize McCandless’s journey by comparing him to other eminent outdoorsmen.

“‘DAY 100! MADE IT!’ he noted jubilantly on August 5, proud of achieving such a significant milestone, ‘BUT IN WEAKEST CONDITION OF LIFE. DEATH LOOMS AS SERIOUS THREAT.’”

This passage from McCandless’s journals captures the foreboding he felt as his conditioned weakened. He had an astute awareness of his perilous predicament, showcasing that he was diligent and methodical even up to his death.