Into The Wild Journal: January 2012

Jan 26, 2012

D. Topic: Point of View - Literary Analysis to Universal Question

1. What is Krakauer's attempting to accomplish using multiple points of view when describing McCandless?
2. What is Krakauer's purpose for using other literary sources at the beginning of each chapter?
3. How might biases and points of view render differing accounts of another person or event?

C. Topic: New Identity - Open Ended to Universal Question

1. Why did McCandless create a new identity?
2. Is this desire to begin again, born anew, a common trait in humanity?

B. Topic: Immigration - closed Ended to Opend Ended Question

1.What were the primary factors which lead McCandless to leave Emory and separate from his family?
2. Are his reasons equal to reasons for change within the broader population?

McCandless & Thoreau #5

"Although McCandless was enough of a realist to know that hunting game was an unavoidable component of living off the land, he had always been ambivalent about killing animals. That ambivalence turned to remorse soon after he shot the moose. It was relatively small, weighing perhaps six hundred or seven hundred pounds, but it neverthless amounted to a huge quantity of meat."
-Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, page 166

McCandless & Thoreau #4

"Unlike the most of us, he was the sort of person who insisted on living out his beliefs."
-Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, page 67

McCandless & Thoreau #3

"On the face of it, bull head city doesn't seem like the kind of place that would appeal to an adherent of Thoreau and Tolstory, an ideologue who expressed nothing but contempt for the bourgeois trappings of mainstream America. McCandless, neverthless, took a strong liking to Bull head. Maybe it was his affinity for the lumpen, who were well represented in the community's trailer parks and campgrounds and laundromats; perhaps he simply fell in love with the stark desert landscape that encircles the town."
-Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, page 39

McCandless & Thoreau #2

"Sometimes I wish I hadn't met you though. Tramping is too easy with all this money. My days were more exciting when I was penniless and had to forage around for my next meal."

-Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, page 33

McCandless & Thoreau #1

"Driving west out of Atlanta, he intended to invent an utterly new life for himself, me in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience. To symbolize the complete severance from his previous life, he even adopted a new name. No longer would he answer to Chris McCandless; he was now Alexander Supertramp, master of his own destiny."
-Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, page 23

Jan 25, 2012

Krakauer's attitude toward McCandless #5

" Indeed, he delighted in ridiculing the policies of the Democratic Party and was a vocal admirer of Ronald Reagan. At Emory he went so far as to co-found a college Republican Club. Chris's seemingly anomalous political positions were perhaps best summed up by Thoreau's declaration in "Civil Disobedience" : "I heartily accept the motto- 'That government is best which governs least.'" Beyond that his views were not easily characterized."
-Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, page 122

Krakauer's attitude toward McCandless #4

" As a youth, I am told, I was willful, self-absorbed, intermittently reckless, moody. I disappointed my father in the usual ways. Like McCandless, figures of male authority aroused in me a confusing medley of corked fury and hunger to please. If something captured my undisciplined imagination, I pursued it with a zeal bordering on obsession, and from the age of seventeen until my late twenties that something was mountain climbing."

-Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, page 134

Krakauer's attitude toward McCandless #3

" McCandless didn't conform particularly well to the bush-casualty stereotype. Although he was rash, untutored in the ways of the backcountry, and incautious to the point of foolhardiness, he wasn't incompetent-he wouldn't have lasted 113 days if he were and he wasn't a nutcase, he wasn't a sociopath, he wasn't an outcast. McCandless was something else-although precisely what is hard to say. A pilgrim, perhaps."
-Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, page 84

Krakauer's attitude toward McCandless #2

" Unlike Muir and Thoreau, 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. He soon discovered, however, what Muir and Thoreau already knew: An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one's attention outward as much as inward, and it is impossible to live off the land without developing both a subtle understanding of, and a strong emotional bond with, that land and all it holds."
-Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, page 183

Krakauer's attitude toward McCandless #1

" McCandless's apparent sexual innocence, however, is a corollary of a personality type that our culture purports to admire, at least in the case of its more famous adherents. His ambivalence toward sex echoes that of celebrated others who embraced wilderness with single-minded passion-Thoreau"
-Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, page 66

Society's attitude toward McCandless #5

""He helped me a lot," Burres acknowledges. "He watched the table when I needed to leave, categorized all the books, made a lot of sales. He seemed to get a real kick out of it. Alex was big on the classics: Dickens, H G. Wells, Mark Twain, Jack London."
-Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, page 44

Society's attitudes toward McCandless #4

" I don't think he ever hung out with any of the employees after work or anything. When he talked, he was always going on about trees and nature and weird stuff like that. we all thought he was missing a few screws."
-Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, page 40

Society's attitude toward McCandless #3

" It wasn't up to McDonald's standards to come smelling the way he did. So finally they delegated me to tell him that he needed to take a bath more often. Ever since I told him, there was a clash between us. And then the other employees-they were just trying to be nice-they started asking him if he needed some soap or anything. That made him mad-you could tell. but he never showed it outright. About three weeks later, he just walked out the door and quit."
-Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, page 41

Society's attitude toward McCandless #2

"He read a lot. Used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing."
-Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, page 18

Society's attitude toward McCandless #1

" These are what Alex used to drink," says Westerberg with a frown, swirling the ice in his White Russian. "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. A lot of folks here in town got pretty attached to old Alex. Kind of a strange deal what happened to him."
-Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, page 16

McCandless' attitude toward a flawed society #5

"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 ways they might improve their lives."
-Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, page 113

McCandless' attitude toward a flawed society #4

"The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. 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."
-Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, page 57

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