Passions and longing youth are one way of looking at Krakauer’s Into the Wild. This passion is distributed throughout the novel with many different aspects. Krakauer put passion into his words within his concepts. This passion in words is the insight or the power of one’s own dream. The passion is brought into the book with fierceness. “It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it”(Into…Wild 155). Krakauer is saying that being young is easy to have a strong passion towards something, since you think you will achieve your passion. Longing youth, another concept or thought Krakauer brings up. As an adult longing for youth becomes more and more common. As a child, or a naïve mine, you always have the perspective to achieve anything, but the older you get, the more the passion dies out – or better yet the belief in the passion. The longing youth is an idea that becomes more and more a dream as a person ages. This novel focuses on that longing of youth, as a key desire of the protagonist(s) and humans in general. This longing will not and does not stop until one reaches it, as Krakauer would put it.
Christopher McCandless, a traveler, who was searching for a piece of his own journey finds the meaning of youth and what the passion behind it was. Even though death had come to him, McCandless, still found out the true passion that was driven behind everything. Even though, he had everything he could get, he left the world for his own journey. His passion, his longing for youth, began to show throughout his journey. “I don’t want to know what time it is. I don’t want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters” (Into…Wild 7). It was his time to go back and find the passion he lost. McCandless had a motive in life that he grasped and took advantage of. His journey of losing himself in his own path, helped him go after his youth and passion without taking a second look back.
Adults tend to forget what they grieved for when they were young. Their passion from their youth disappears and does not affect their life anymore. Krakauer, basically saying that if adults who remember their past passion and youth they will be able to connect to McCandless better. McCandless, acted upon his instinct and did not look back, instead kept walking. Adults who are able to remember their passion and longing of youth, will have the same thinking as McCandless. McCandless, was an adult who remember his past passions and went from there. The adults who read this and connected towards their past desires, would understand why McCandless left everything behind for his passion. “The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light” (Into…Wild 32). Once the reader captures their past passion and their longing of youth, they slowly start to understand the longing for their old passion. These adults began to think like McCandless and do not judge him but go along with him to his journey.
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