The purpose of this research is to examine Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, an account of the personal odyssey of one Christo pher McCandless, who made a project of renouncing his middle class family connections after graduation from college, and some two years and four months later was found dead in the Alaskan wilderness. The plan of the research will be to set forth a synopsis of Krakauer's account, an expanded version of a story that originally appeared in the periodical Outside, and then to discuss issues questions McCandless's experience raise regarding priorities of life.
Into the Wild can be described as something of a meditation on the cost-benefit analysis of the lure of the wilderness in its various configurations--desert, sea, mountains, snow, forest. Each chapter begins with at least one epigram from any of a num ber of acknowledged classics of their kind, from Jack London's wilderness adventures to Thoreau's Walden to McCandless's diary. The epigram appears meant as a commentary on the description of each succeeding episode of McCandless's journey, begun more or less in secret as far as his family was concerned, with gradua tion in Georgia in 1990. The object of the exercise appears to have been to have truck with "the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found" (Krakauer citing McCandless 37). The method McCandless chose to do this was to seek out opportunities to camp his way across America, along the way renouncing the trappings of the middle class, including money, abundant food, clothing, and, as it turned out, a car that malfunctioned in the Nevada desert and was abandoned.
Subsistence living and a series of odd jobs from South Dakota to California to Oregon to Washington sufficed as McCandless roamed his way in apparent search of vital, immediate experience, and always, a connection with the outdoors. But inex perience with and lack of know...