is experience by Huck Finn in Huckleberry Finn is highly illustrative. McCandless, raised in an upper-middle class family, rejected the values of that class and of mainstream American culture in general. McCandless, upon graduating college, gave $25,000 to OxFam, a famine relief organization, abandoned his car and left behind forever the life he knew including his family and friends. Being raised on the crass values of materialism and witnessing the exploitation of nature, McCandless felt as if rejecting society and setting up existence as a survivalist in nature was the higher moral course of action. Found emaciated and starved to death in an abandoned bus, many viewed McCandless as a foolhardy and nanve young man unaware of the enormous challenge he was facing and its potential consequences. Even Krakauer maintains, ôAlaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their lives,ö (4).
When comparing KrakauerÆs comments above to Huckleberry Finn, we might see how many would view HuckÆs unwillingness to betray his friend, the slave Jim, in a similar manner. Huck was raised by a drunken and abusive alcoholic father. The whole of his life he was raised in a society with rigid distinctions of class, gender, and race. These distinctions were colored over by the patina of religious devotion and righteousness. As Beaver notes, of the society in which Huck is taught values, ôWe meet representatives of all three classes from upper and lower orders of the ruling Whites to Blacks. For that is the first division: Whites (who are æpeopleÆ) and Blacks (just æniggersÆ). æPeople,Æ in their turn are further divided into two castes: æthe qualityÆ and plain æfolks,Æö (65). As such, Huck is raised with firm distinctions between rich and poor, white and black, and other divisive categories of social worth.
Krakauer presents Al...