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

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