Into the Wild-eNotes

Am Lit/Comp

Whited

Chris McCandless remains a somewhat ghostly presence even in this biography of his life. Although Krakauer uses frequent excerpts from Chris's personal journals, the reader always feels somewhat distanced, partly owing to his habit of writing about himself in the third person under an assumed name. Only Chris's final journal entries are written in the first person and signed with his real name, perhaps underscoring the shocking realization of first the possibility and then the certainty of his own imminent death. The tone of these final words is frightened at first, then rueful and courageous, and finally serene and reconciled. Other than these journal extracts, all of the information about McCandless is fragmentary and pieced together from the testimony of people who had met him on his journeys. Their accounts seem to paint him as an intensely bright and defiantly independent young man who clung to the stern and archaic ideals gleaned from his readings.

According to the reminiscences of his family and university friends, McCandless was a seemingly well-adjusted twenty-two-year-old at the time of his disappearance. He was athletic, bright, and a natural-born entrepreneur, excelling at so many things that he tended to be overconfident. A double major with above average grades, he led a life of comparable comfort and good fortune. He worked on the student newspaper at Emory University and, like many other people his age, thought about injustice in the world around him. He seemed to take life more seriously than many peers, however, refusing to join a fraternity and declaring that, according to his principles, he would no longer give or accept gifts. He appeared, on balance, to be an affable and intense friend according to all who met him, but there are puzzling glimpses of the unhappiness directed at his parents. While appearing to be content with his home life, McCandless revealed to a few trusted people a fierce disdain and bitterness toward his parents, whom he saw as unfairly tyrannical.

Krakauer is careful to avoid weighting Into the Wild with an excess of authorial judgment; although he concedes at the outset that his own feelings about McCandless will become obvious, he painstakingly tries not to impose his deeply-held convictions on his readers. A notable subtext in this biography is the way the young man's story and any number of other themes seem to inter-illuminate each other for the author. In the introduction to Into the Wild, Krakauer says "in trying to understand McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other, larger subjects as well: the grip Wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure high risk activities hold for young men of a certain mind, the complicated, highly charged bond that exists between fathers and sons."

A significant theme is the deep and secret alienation that McCandless felt toward his parents. He was intensely angry with them, although his complaints never seem to have been very clear. Bitterness and frustration often build walls between the competing natures of strong-willed sons and equally inflexible fathers, and Krakauer's portrait of the elder McCandless as a self-made man with a powerful personality makes this possibility a very reasonable one. However, a persevering positivism such as McCandless possessed might easily have overcome such an obstacle, and Walt McCandless remembers that, regardless of everything, he loved spending time with his son. Krakauer suggests one possible reason that kept reanimating his powerful antipathy may have been his discovery that the end of his father's first marriage and the beginning of the second were messy and fraught with tension and dissembling on all sides. These long-ago marital troubles seem to have enraged the son's impeccable and unforgiving sense of morality, and eventually led him to judge and condemn his father forever, using moral standards so unrelentingly severe he would not even apply them to his friends.

He seems in the whole breadth of his nature to have been possessed of an insatiable hunger to discover some redeeming truth about mankind through himself. Nevertheless, his insistence on doing things his way caused him to neglect several basic precautions that would probably have kept an experienced woodsman alive: a good hunting gun with ample ammunition, reliable information about the area he would be venturing into, and a dependable U.S. Geological Survey topographic map. Krakauer has concluded that the actual cause of Chris's death by starvation was a form of poisoning to which he succumbed after eating some wild seeds that even the experts never knew were highly toxic. Ironically, this was a mistake anyone might have made, but McCandless would not have had to eat the seeds if he had not allowed himself to be trapped by runoff from the Teklanika river, if he had possessed a gun adequate for hunting game, or a map to show him that half a mile away from his camp was a way to cross the torrent. As one friend was to observe later, McCandless, given his passion and intensity, sometimes had a problem seeing the forest for the trees.

While he remains an elusive figure, others who are more distinctly represented in Into the Wild include the diverse, ordinary, and not-so-ordinary characters who briefly met and befriended him. These include "rubber tramps," Jan Burres and her boyfriend Bob, who ran into McCandless along the United States Highway 101. Jan felt a maternal impulse toward Chris, and he responded with an almost waif-like affection. At other times, he was given work and a place to stay by Wayne Westerberg in Carthage, a small, hard-working South Dakota town. Ronald Franz, another friend, had lost his own family to a tragic automobile accident long before Mc- Candless was born. Franz was touched by Chris's earnest good nature and actually asked the young man if he would let Franz adopt him as his grandson. McCandless responded with characteristic evasiveness; having renounced his family, it seems as if he is instinctively drawn to parental figures even while he was trying to push them away.

Essay Options

1. According to Jon Krakauer, Chris McCandless died as a result of "one or two seemingly insignificant blunders." What were those blunders and how could Chris have avoided them? Discuss the kinds of preparations that someone planning to live in the bush should take before setting out.

2. Who are "Rubber Tramps" and "Leather Tramps"? Describe their way of life. Discuss the pros and cons of a vagabond lifestyle.

3. Consider the various accounts of experiments similar to McCandless's that Krakauer relates. Discuss the kinds of idealism or alienation that lead these young people to abandon past lives and lead potentially dangerous existence.

4. Choose someone who has attempted to live in the wild the way McCandless did and research that person's experiences. Write a short biography about their adventures and the lessons they may have learned.

5. Krakauer seems unwilling to judge either McCandless or any of the people who were involved in his life. Many people have either praised or condemned McCandless for his foolhardiness or Krakauer for his sympathetic approach to telling this story without making judgements. How would you defend or criticize the author's refusal to claim a position?

6. There are instances in this book where Krakauer introduces autobiographical material and suggests that his own experiences influence his perspective. Discuss an episode from your own life where your feelings about past experiences may have influenced your judgment or understanding of someone else.

7. The often conflicted relationships between children and their parents is one of the themes of Into the Wild. Describe and discuss some obstacles to communication between generations that you can identify either in this book, or in your experience.

8. Krakauer claims that he tries to "minimize" his "authorial presence." Describe what you think he means by this, and discuss whether you should consider authorial presence when you read other kinds of literature, such as a work of fiction.

9. Krakauer uses quotations from other books about the wilderness as well as anecdotes about other ill-fated young adventurers as intertexts in Into the Wild. Judging from your own response to this book, discuss how the use of intertexts contributes to your understanding of the story. Literary Value

Documentary biographical writing is not celebrated for its prime literariness. Into the Wild, however, features many of the narrative qualities that mark the best novels. Krakauer's deft interweaving of diverse personalities and locations lend his work a crisp credibility and resonance, while enabling the author to shape a sustained drama from the facts and figures that comprise the documentary materials at hand. His generous and candid descriptions of his varied interviewees eschew cliches and add color and texture to this book.

Krakauer has made Into the Wild a much more complicated book by including many intertexts in the form of thoughtfully placed epigraphs and excerpts from the books that influenced Chris, as well as some anecdotal stories about other young adventurers whose attraction to nature also proved fatal. Krakauer even relates a hairraising tale from his own youth that resonates with the same idealism and stubborn adventurousness that characterized McCandless. This multifaceted story is part biography, part documentary, part autobiography, and part contemplation of human nature.

Krakauer records the minutiae of local scenes by successfully combining his knowledge of the outdoors with the devoted attention of an experienced journalist and professional nonfiction writer. Descriptions of Alaska and other places are both informationally dense and excitingly written. Krakauer's readers acquire a valuable familiarity with remoter parts of their world while being captivated by a riveting story.

Krakauer claims he loves writing books because he loves researching them. Although he makes his living writing shorter magazine articles, he considers the genre "reductionist by nature." Writing an entire book enables him to carefully consider the more complex issues or details of a story that just cannot properly fit into a shorter work. Moreover, Krakauer is a responsible researcher who acknowledges the important role of the McCandless family in the process of researching and preparing Into the Wild for publication. He notes with appreciation the complexities of the personal cost this may have meant for McCandless's parents and siblings. Readers perusing the acknowledgements at the end of the book will come to appreciate the scope of a task like this biography. They may also want to compare Krakauer's willingness to accept and acknowledge assistance with Chris McCandless's seeming disregard for any substantial help whatsoever.

Social Sensitivity

A number of very unconventional people are portrayed in Into the Wild, and author Krakauer presents them with great respect and sympathy. He describes an assortment of transients like the "rubber tramps" who live out of their cars while eking out a living hawking wares at flea markets and swap meets. McCandless was a "leather tramp" himself because he had given up his car and relied on his shoe leather to get him around. It turns out that there are few common denominators among people who elect to live a vagabond existence; they may be highly educated, disenchanted with the idea of putting down roots somewhere, and disgusted with the thought of trudging through a nine-to-five existence, or they may be down on their luck and homeless. McCandless met, and Krakauer interviewed, all types, from free spirits Jan Burres and her boyfriend, to Charlie, a mildly eccentric old man who took pity on Chris and allowed him to "squat" in a trailer. There are many people for whom a comfortable, stable lifestyle holds little interest or merit, and Krakauer's insightful descriptions humanize the strangers that pass us on the highway. In much the same way, Krakauer renders the lives of the most ordinary people—the ones we meet briefly in nondescript small towns or on the road, like Wayne Westerberg or Jim Gallien—visible in a manner that makes them extraordinary, familiar, and comforting. It becomes clear that people who live on the road or hold down unglamorous jobs are often possessed of great dignity, warmth, and an insight that enables them to recognize something special in a stranger like Chris.

The original Outside article that was published in January, 1993, was greeted with a barrage of mail that represented deeply polarized responses. Many writers condemned Chris's foolhardiness and Krakauer's refusal to judge him in a harash light, while others expressed sympathy and admiration for the young man. It is therefore to Krakauer's credit that he avoids offering any easy judgement, striving not to force any conclusions on his reader. Although he clearly sympathizes with Chris in a special way, he attempts to back away from stating whether Chris was right or wrong in his decisions and actions, urging readers to judge for themselves. An issue that is central to Into the Wild is Chris's estrangement from his family. Krakauer, while still withholding judgment, presents Chris's mysterious condemnation of the parents who tried to give him everything they had never had and simply and clearly shows the pain this rejection caused, even while he investigates the other side of the equation. He acknowledges that Walt loved his children fiercely and wanted them to have the things he had struggled without, but he notes the force of the father's character and expectations that would have threatened to suffocate his son. With as much respect as possible to Walt and Billie McCandless and their family, Krakauer presents honestly and without prejudice the discovery about their early relationship that was probably a catalyst in Chris's alienation.

Discussion Topics

1. Why did McCandless reject his parents' lifestyle?

2. What do you think of McCandless's decision to discard his identity and past life without a backward look? Would you do the same thing if you were in his place, or do you think it would be important to discuss your decision with your family first, even if you were certain that they would try to dissuade you?

3. Pretend that you could speak for McCandless. What would you have to say to Krakauer, his biographer. To his parents?

4. What do you think you would want to say to McCandless if you were his father? If you were his mother?

5. The author believes that McCandless was deeply embittered by his discoveries about his father's past. How do you think he should have handled his discovery?

6. Do you think that Krakauer's empathy for McCandless may have influenced his critical judgement in examining Chris' actions and decisions? Do you think the sympathetic way that Krakauer tells the story may influence your own opinion of McCandless?

7. Krakauer insists that he "won't claim to be an impartial biographer." What kind of book do you think an "impartial biographer" might write? How do you think such a biography would be different than the book Krakauer has written? Would it be better, worse, or just too different to properly judge? What conditions would a biography have to meet in order for its author to be able to claim impartiality? Do you think this is a realistic or a reasonable expectation?

8. What do you think of the many people in this story who seem to be living as transients or squatters? Does the freedom of their lifestyle appeal to you? Do you think they should attempt to establish stable homes and livelihoods?

9. The public response to McCandless's story has been deeply divided. Is this story an example of tragic foolhardiness or heroic idealism?

Essays and Criticism

Into the Wild as Greek Tragedy

Whether he was a vagabond, genius, whack job, free spirit, rebel, or poet, Christopher McCandless (also known by the pseudonym Alexander Supertramp) was unique among men. At an age when most upper-class kids begin their arduous climb toward becoming the next big thing, Christopher McCandless went in the opposite direction—he became a nobody. His two-year descent into the furthest margins of society baffled and fascinated many, including author Jon Krakauer. Following an article he wrote for Outside magazine, Krakauer authored a painstaking reconstruction of McCandless’s odyssey, Into the Wild. In committing the story to paper, Krakauer attempts to answer one question: why did McCandless do it? It is an impossible question to answer no matter how earnestly Krakauer pursues it.

Krakauer acknowledges his own obsession in the introduction, and his crafting of the story raises its own questions. By fashioning the last two years of Christopher McCandless’s life into the book Into the Wild, is Krakauer making it a modern-day tragedy? Does Into the Wild invite parallels to notions of tragedy originating in ancient Greece? If so, what elements apply? Much of what we know about how the ancient Greeks developed and evaluated tragedy comes from Aristotle—or so some think. His treatise, Poetics, may not have been written by him and instead may represent the notes of a student or students at one of his many lectures. Either way, the document is still considered the starting point for any discussion of the nature of tragedy and includes analysis of tragedy’s composite elements. To examine Into the Wild's fitness for comparison, Aristotelian notions of tragic heroes and the definition of tragedy must be considered, along with staple structural elements like choruses and poetic language.

All tragedies center on a hero, so in order to determine whether Chris McCandless has been transformed into one in Krakauer’s book, McCandless’s resemblance to a tragic hero must be established in specific terms. In the Greek model, tragic heroes usually come from noble families. While Chris was neither a prince nor the son of a politician, he did come from an upper-class background. He also went on a journey, as many tragic heroes do. Yet the real test of his status as a tragic hero is his embodiment of a trait the Greeks called hamartia. Since it is a translated term, its exact meaning is often debated but can generally be interpreted as “tragic flaw,” a trait that blindsides the hero and leads him to his own ruin. While some would certainly argue that McCandless was fanatical or hubristic in taking on nature itself, that definition does not quite fit the McCandless depicted in Into the Wild. After all, Krakauer’s whole purpose in writing the book was to try to determine what trait led McCandless down his ultimately terminal path. Mere pride or adolescent stupidity seems like an incomplete answer.

Another interpretation of hamartia presents it less as a character flaw than a misunderstanding of one’s place in the world. In this light, hamartia seems to fit Chris McCandless quite well. The rich kid who leaves the material world, his family, and his identity behind to pursue enlightenment in the natural landscape seems the very definition of someone looking for his place. In some ways, Krakauer presents McCandless’s transformation into Alexander Supertramp in this light in Into the Wild: an ambitious young man who erroneously saw himself as an adventurer in the outdoors. Linking hamartia to the fate of a tragic hero is crucial to this interpretation. According to Into the Wild, Chris McCandless died because of his own misconception of himself.

In the Greek tragic model, a chorus typically served many purposes, one of which was to try to warn the tragic hero of his own hamartia. In order for the results to be a true tragedy, however, the hero does not listen. Krakauer portrays McCandless’s descent into death in a similar fashion. Krakauer structures the whole story as a flashback, often retaining narrative details from the present. Throughout the book, he includes minutiae about his interview subjects’ appearance, manner, gait, and living conditions. In each chapter, the reader is keenly aware that the subjects are reflecting back upon McCandless’s life armed with the knowledge of his death (and the emotions brought on by his passing). As a result, the reflections of the people whose lives McCandless touched are tinged by sadness, regret, and a potent sense of foreboding. In this structure, McCandless’s friends and acquaintances serve as a kind of Greek chorus. Their stories all contain warnings they gave McCandless or ways they tried to alter his path in life. The man who dropped McCandless off in Alaska for his final hike tried to talk the headstrong Chris out of it, or at least get him to improve his gear before the dangerous jaunt. The elderly Ron Franz, whose own life is filled with family tragedy, offered to adopt Alex/Chris as a means to fortify their tie and keep him close. Throughout the story, Chris McCandless’s bonds to his friends in South Dakota seemed strongest of all, as if perhaps they had the best chance of keeping Chris/Alex from taking off for Alaska. Much of the structure of Into the Wild is built upon this chorus of people charmed and warmed enough by McCandless’s spirit to try to stop him from going too far.

Author Krakauer’s own voice joins this chorus in fashioning even more pointed warnings about McCandless’s recklessness. Krakauer includes accounts of other self-styled adventurers who made similar Alaskan treks. In the interest of perspective, some of the tales are of seasoned climbers who succumbed to the dangers of the wilderness; others are simply reckless endeavors that were poorly planned and executed, yielding tragic results. Still others tell of real insanity, of fanaticism that bypassed hubris and suicidal tendencies because the traveler’s mindset was so clearly unfit. While Krakauer uses these stories to provide counterpoints to try to explore the reasons behind McCandless’s drive, they increase the sense of impending doom in much the same way as choral odes do. Another structural staple of tragedy (and one much discussed by Aristotle) is poetic language. At first glance, the plainspoken, everyday chitchat and regional patois found in Into the Wild may seem an unlikely fit. In truth, Krakauer goes out of his way to capture the “characters” in McCandless’s life without linguistic hyperbole. Yet in including excerpts from McCandless’s diaries and letters, Krakauer does achieve an element of poetry. In Krakauer’s assessment, Chris McCandless was somewhat precious on the page. His diaries often refer to himself in the third person, and his letters certainly bear the influence of the literary works that he so loved. Yet structurally, Krakauer achieves a kind of inversion of the implementation of poetic language used in Greek tragedy. Where in traditional tragedy, the scenes of dialogue are interrupted by the more poetic choral odes, in Into the Wild the plainspoken chorus of McCandless’s friends is interspersed with McCandless’s more florid (and affected) writings. Though the technique is inverted in his book, Krakauer achieves the balance of different types of language employed in traditional tragedy.

In the Aristotelian sense, tragedy also has to have a catharsis—a purgation of two emotions most frequently translated as pity and fear. Where scholars tend to differ is whether this catharsis is felt by the tragic hero, the audience, or both. Whether Chris McCandless/Alexander Supertramp experienced a catharsis is also a matter of debate. Certainly the written materials he left behind indicate a growing dread about his circumstances. The bigger question, and one that perhaps drove Krakauer to write Into the Wild in the first place, is whether McCandless ever truly recognized his own misconception of his place in the world. Readers are left without an answer.

Whether or not Into the Wild is ultimately cathartic for the reader, Krakauer certainly edges the story in that direction. Despite Chris/Alex’s repeated efforts to hold people at a distance, his inherent gregariousness created bonds throughout his travels. One woman became enraptured by his passion and intelligence after spending only one night with him in a spirited discussion of life and literature. The passing of McCandless is more keenly felt because of these attachments, so it is at least cathartic for his friends, regardless of the reader’s response.

Finally, tragedy is often translated as being “whole” or “complete” and having “weight” or “magnitude.” Does nto the Wild give McCandless that importance? After all, he was just a kid who wandered the country looking for the meaning of life and trying to find himself. He did not start a cultural revolution, nor did he incite changes in government or education. If he had not died in that bus in Alaska, the article in Outside magazine that Krakauer wrote would never have appeared. No one would know about the journey of Alexander Supertramp. Still, Christopher McCandless did die, and because of that, Krakauer penned the successful book Into the Wild. In doing so, he crafted a modern-day answer to Greek tragedy that gave Christopher McCandless’s life the magnitude it deserves.

The Dark Continent of Ambiguity

“I was haunted,” says Jon Krakauer in explaining why he wrote about Chris McCandless, whose journey away from the conventions and materialism of contemporary American culture and into the wilderness of Alaska ended with loneliness and starvation. What haunts the author is not only the facts of the story as he traces them but also the “unsettling parallels between events” in McCandless’s story and his own. Unabashedly, the author uses his own experience to gain insight into that of his real-life character, immediately telling his reader in his opening note that he does so “in the hope that [his] experiences will throw some oblique light on the enigma of Chris McCandless’s death.” But Krakauer does not limit his study to a comparison between his character and himself. In addition to his own experiences, Krakauer weaves together accounts of McCandless provided by those he met in his travels as well as by his family and friends, brief vignettes and longer case studies of others who have lived on the edge, and excerpts from the works of writers whom McCandless read on his journey. This multiplicity of perspective as well as its arrangement in the narrative serve to create disjuncture and ambiguity, and in so doing they preserve the complexity of McCandless’s motivation to go into the wild in the manner he did.

Thus, as Krakauer tells readers from the beginning, his purpose is twofold: he intends to be clear about his own “conviction” concerning the meaning behind McCandless’s story but also to leave it “to the reader to form his or her own opinion of” it. The word conviction packs a strong punch, connoting finality, yet Krakauer wants to soften this by placing it within a context of ambiguity—the multiple perspectives—that in many ways invite a dialogue that resists closure. Indeed, the conspicuous use of the pronouns “his or her” invites further inclusion, signifying meanings that recognize gendered differences as well. Does the author, in fact, accomplish all of this, and how does he do so?

Krakauer creates ambiguity by means of a vaguely circular yet ultimately disjunctive structure to the narrative, grounding it primarily in location, which fractures the temporal sequence of McCandless’s story. It begins with “The Alaska Interior” in Chapter 1. It moves in Chapter 2 to “The Stampede Trail,” the site of McCandless’s death, to which he returns intermittently throughout the story, concluding with it in Chapters 17 and 18. “Davis Gulch,” Chapter 9, resides in the center of the book, which would in a traditional narrative be a stop on the journey of the hero, but in this case it is a place that McCandless didn’t even visit and probably had never heard of. Instead, it contains the story of a different hero altogether, that of Everett Ruess, an adventurer lost in the Canyonlands of Utah some seventy years ago. Immediately before this vignette, Chapter 8, broadly titled “Alaska,” provides brief stories of three other adventurers. Later, toward the end of the book, Krakauer devotes two full chapters, Chapters 14 and 15, both titled “The Stikine Ice Cap,” to give drama to and meditate on his own adventures in mountain climbing in Alaska. In between all this he takes readers to different moments in McCandless’s life, but all are grounded in the place of the events as much as by the events themselves. In this way, Krakauer moves readers imaginatively, spatially, and, it sometimes seems, rather randomly through McCandless’s story.

Krakauer complicates this disjunctive pattern and amplifies ambiguity by using multiple points of view to describe each place, McCandless, and the reasons behind McCandless’s behavior. This shifting succeeds in showing McCandless’s life from various perspectives rather than telling about it from one. Sometimes the author speaks in his own narrative voice; in other places different characters speak in theirs; and in still others literary texts speak, sometimes merely by their placement in the narrative—their location, so to speak—and at other times by the narrator’s or other characters’ commentary on them. A review of a few chapters reveals this strategy and its results.

Jim Gallien, the driver who picks up McCandless while he is hitchhiking from Fairbanks to the Stampede Trail, is the lens through which readers see both setting and hero in Chapter 1. He says that “the bush is an unforgiving place...that cares nothing for hope or longing” and that McCandless might be “one of those crackpots from the lower forty-eight who come north to live out ill-considered Jack London fantasies.” Whether Gallien, “a union electrician,” would be sufficiently familiar with Jack London to make such an informed comparison, one cannot be sure, and it probably does not matter anyway because the very point here is to smudge definitive opinion.

Chapter 2 indirectly challenges and reflects on Gallien’s opinion of the wilderness and McCandless by opening with an epigraph that juxtaposes McCandless’s graffito on Jack London “carved into a piece of wood discovered at the site of Chris McCandless’s death” with a quotation from London’s White Fang. McCandless’s words hero-worship London as “King,” while this King describes Alaska as “so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter...cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility.” Without directly commenting on this material, Krakauer then, in his narrative voice, describes the chapter’s title, “The Stampede Trail.” The Outer Range around the Trail, he says, “sprawls across the flats like a rumpled blanket on an unmade bed,” and the Trail itself “meander[s] through the tangled, rolling bottomland.” The figurative language here interprets the setting as benign if not comforting, which sharply contrasts with the terms used by Gallien —“unforgiving” and “caring nothing for hope”—and by London—“lone and cold.” Which description counts? Or do they all? Krakauer withholds an answer.

Following this brief description of the setting, Krakauer speaks as reporter, providing data concerning McCandless’s death, using the three men who discovered McCandless’s body as his source of information. This is all quite cut and dry: “just the facts, ma’am.” The chapter then ends with a description of McCandless’s dead body: “virtually no subcutaneous fat remained on [it], and the muscles had withered significantly....McCandless’s remains weighed sixty-seven founds. Starvation was posited as the most probable cause of death.” Certainly nothing in this language substantiates Krakauer’s soothing description of the Stampede Trail, which blankets and rolls, but instead appears to confirm that of London and Gallien—yet in a far different tone.

However, rather than resolve or recognize these inconsistencies, Krakauer ignores them—in fact, it is easy to overlook them altogether, for the story thrives on differing opinions. From the description of McCandless’s body at the end of Chapter 2, Krakauer moves readers to various locations through even more points of view. For this reason, it is not at all surprising when Chapter 8 tells of other adventurers in Alaska and Chapter 9, the very heart of the book, takes readers to Davis Gulch and the story of Everett Ruess along with a passing reference to monks who settled (and died) on an island off the coast of Iceland in the fifth and sixth centuries—skipping sixteen centuries to the past as well as to a different continent to provide insight into the actions of a twentieth-century young man.

Throughout all of this, Krakauer embeds each story into the other and then each into McCandless’s, ultimately providing an array of possibilities concerning McCandless’s motivations, all of which build tension and the confusion that Billie, McCandless’s mother, expresses at the end of Chapter 13: “I just don’t understand why he had to take those kind of chances....I just don’t understand it at all.” With these words, delayed through two-thirds of the book, Krakauer consolidates and renders inadequate all the information raised up to this point, for even with it the mother cannot comprehend the actions of her son. Using scenic devices familiar to novel writing, Krakauer shows the mother at the kitchen table “weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep.”

Although Krakauer acknowledges that the mother’s “bereavement...makes even the most eloquent apologia for high- risk activities ring fatuous and hollow,” he proceeds to offer just that in the two chapters that follow, which, significantly, concern his own experiences mountain climbing in Alaska. In rendering his own desire, in the words of Thoreau, “to suck the marrow” from life, he interprets himself and his actions and, by projection, those of McCandless. He concludes that he and McCandless “had a similar intensity, a similar heedlessness, a similar agitation of soul.” His conviction is that it was only a “matter of chance” that he survived his own adventures in Alaska and McCandless did not. His conviction is also that both he and McCandless were “stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. [They] couldn’t resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink. The hint of what was concealed in those shadows terrified [them], but [they] caught sight of something in the glimpse, something forbidden…that was no less compelling than the sweet, hidden petals of a woman’s sex.”

Sweet, hidden petals of a woman’s sex? No wonder Krakauer feels haunted by the mystery of McCandless’s death, and no wonder he wants to use his experience to shed “light” on such a dark, hidden territory. Certainly no language from any source compares to this spicy stuff, and if locating this space was McCandless’s motivation in renouncing the comforts of middle-class life, it is no wonder that his mother did not understand what her son was up to. However, this reference to the physical parts of a woman’s sexuality as an answer to the question of a mother becomes even more complicated when considered in terms of the comments Krakauer offers next; further ruminations lead him to conclude that “McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul.” Such interiority, in this book that foregrounds location and has already posited the “hidden petals of a woman’s sex” as what seduces men such as he and McCandless to take on adventure and risk, cannot help but gesture again toward connotations of female space. As a result, it is ironic—tragically so—when Krakauer describes McCandless’s death as a return to the primal interiority, the womb: “he crawled into the sleeping bag his mother had sewn for him and slipped into unconsciousness.” In terms of Krakauer’s imagery, the son, in a sense, does return to his mother, but such figurative language seems to mock rather than console her grief.

Krakauer does warn the reader at the beginning of the book that his “convictions will be apparent soon enough,” and so the reader should be prepared for just that, as unsettling as that may be. At the end of the book, however, Krakauer attempts to reestablish the ambiguity he created prior to this point. In Chapter 18 (“The Stampede Trail”), he and two other men revisit the site where McCandless died, endeavoring to figure out just what made this young man tick, just why he took such risks, and what in fact caused his death. Increasing the immediacy by speaking in the present tense, the narrator says, “Roman, Andrew, and I stay up well past midnight, trying to make sense of McCandless’s life and death, yet his essence remains slippery, vague, elusive.” Slippery, vague, elusive? Judith Fetterley’s “resisting reader” might find a correspondence between these adjectives and the male perspective that “caught sight of something in the glimpse, something forbidden…that was no less compelling than the sweet, hidden petals of a woman’s sex.”

In the book’s epilogue, McCandless’s mother comments, “The fact that Chris is gone is a sharp hurt I feel every single day....It’s going to be hard every day for the rest of my life.” But the final point of view is Krakauer’s, viewing the location where McCandless died from a helicopter rising from and leaving the scene: “The roof of the bus [in which McCandless’s body was found] remains visible among the stunted trees, a tiny white gleam in a wild green sea, growing smaller and smaller, and then it’s gone.” Just as it does in Krakauer’s description of the Stampede Trail in Chapter 2, a whiff of romanticism in this imagery soothes the reader—although probably not the mother. It is consistent with “the sweet, hidden petals” that the male adventurer seeks in his risks, the interiority of his search, the womb-like setting of McCandless’s death, and finally the “slippery, vague, elusive” reasons behind it.

Just as Freud referred to women as “the dark continent,” using a metaphor of location to describe a mystery that he could not figure out, Krakauer uses metaphors of the feminine to provide mystery to locations that he, and through him McCandless, desire to understand if not conquer. With his own convictions so starkly defined by gender, the ambiguity he hopes to preserve proves rather tenuous by the end of his account of why young Chris McCandless took his chances to survive in the wild of Alaska.

Works Consulted “Dark Continent.” In International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, edited by Alain de Mijolla. Gale Group, 2005. eNotes.com, 2006. Available at http://www.enotes.com/psychoanalysis-encyclopedia/dark-continent (accessed December 30, 2007).

Fetterley, Judith. 1981. The Resisting Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Krakauer, Jon. 1997. Into the Wild. New York: Anchor Books.