Ideology In Into The Wild

Would straying away from the norms of society cause one to be deemed to be a kook? Can one choose to follow an outlandish ideology and still be regarded as a rational individual? Questions such as these arise in Jon Krakauer’s Into The Wild. Krakauer retells the tragic, yet peculiar, story of Christopher McCandless in a unique style, by deviating from McCandless’s arrival to Alaska in Chapter One to accounts from individuals he had met on his adventures. Krakauer designs Into The Wild with a discontinuous timeline which allows the readers to formulate their own conjectures, recognize Christopher McCandless’s mentality, and underscores the relationships McCandless forges with his peers in comparison to his family, which are necessary for the
"McCandless was thrilled to be on his way north, and he was relieved as well—relieved that he had again evaded the impending threat of human intimacy, of friendship, and all the messy emotional baggage that comes with it. He had fled the claustrophobic confines of his family. He’d successfully kept Jan Burres and Wayne Westerberg at arm’s length, flitting out of their lives before anything was expected of him. And now he’d slipped painlessly out of Ron Franz’s life as well."(55) This shows that Christopher McCandless was completely capable of forging deep relationships with people, even strangers. McCandless’s outgoing nature diverges from traits that a sociopath would, which enforces the idea that McCandless did not abandon society due to the inability to establish companionship among his peers. However, McCandless could not hide the obvious struggles he experienced with his parents. Wayne Westerberg caught a sense of these conflicts but did not see it appropriate to delve into it. Krakauer wanted to contrast the different relationships McCandless encountered with testimonies of McCandless’s peers whom describe McCandless as an extrovert, whereas family members regard Christopher as an introvert. This is significant because it asserts justifications as in why McCandless left his home to tramp across the
The structure of the book is unique, indeed, but so was Krakauer; he did not get a college degree, has an ascetic lifestyle, and generally loves to do things his way instead of conforming to the popular culture - in this case, literary style. However, without the accumulation of accounts from different individuals in Christopher McCandless’s life, the story would have a dull, one-dimensional appearance; it would just be another story of a man wandering off and dying in the wild. A majority of the public would conform to the assumption that McCandless was another madman driven into solitude from society by a sociopathic mental disorder. By incorporating a discontinuous structure into his work, Jon Krakauer creates depth into the story of Christopher McCandless that helps explain the intents behind McCandless’s actions, therefore allowing the audience to come to a more rational