Into the Wild: An Analysis - Essay Example

This concern ate him up, causing him to gradually seclude himself from intimacy and friendship during his stay in college. Ultimately, after finishing his college degree, he anonymously donated his $25,000 savings to charity and cut ties with his family. Owning nothing but a few supplies to keep him alive, McCandles traveled to the Northwest, took a variety of odd jobs and prepared himself to his Alaskan trip. During those two years of hitchhiking, he was able to meet new acquaintances but he never dwelt anything further to deepen their friendships.

In 1992, he finally hiked the vast wilderness of Alaska, hunted for food and lived liked a hermit. There, McCandles wrote about his journey, his thoughts about his life and the reality of freedom that he is discovering. After four months of living alone in the wild, McCandles’ body was found dead inside an abandoned bus leaving some journals of his accounts during his trip. From there, Krauker was tasked to write an article about the young hiker but became interested on McCandles’ life and background, which led the author to create a book about his investigation.

The lengths that McCandles made to avoid his family, friends and lifestyle and choose to live homeless with only meager supplies to keep him alive was the main argument that the author tried to answer in this novel. Krauker wrote the book with such attentiveness to the way McCandles chose to live his life. Many who read his article about the hiker’s story gave negative reactions against the poor decisions of McCandles that led to his early demise. They cannot comprehend why a modest, intelligent and compassionate person will hurt his family and the people who love him by abruptly turning his back from his life and isolate himself to the world entirely.

Consequently, the author thought that the stubborn idealism that Christopher encompassed is common to young individuals, and had tried to draw comparisons with himself and the protagonist. Like McCandles, Krauker had an authoritarian father who pushed him to go to medical school though he had a very different plan for his future. Eventually, the young Krauker rebelled against his parents and pursued carpentry and mountain climbing instead. The difference of the two, nonetheless, is that the author learned to forgive his father during the latter’s bout with cancer, while McCandles had never had the opportunity to let go of his anger and resentment.

Moreover, Into the Wild was written as a biography through the author’s point of view, though it was presented as a sort of investigative piece, citing interviews and letter correspondence of McCandles family and acquaintances, tracking his journey to the West and seeking to explain the protagonist’s beliefs and views. The main characters of the story are McCandles, his parents, sister, the people he met during his years on the move, particularly Wayne Westerberg, Jan Burres and Ronald Franz, and Krauker himself.

The book highlights several themes of the story such as the father and son relationship, compassion, isolation, standing to one’s principles, freedom, the pull of danger, adventure, and forgiveness, where the author attempted to enlighten the readers to what goes behind McCandles’ mind in his travails in the last years of his life. Anecdotes from the books favored by McCandles were often used by the author to illustrate the rationale behind the