Into The Wild Rhetorical Analysis

Throughout the tragic novel Into the Wild, author Jon Krakauer provides an in depth analysis of the life and lonely death of Christopher McCandless. McCandless was a young man straight out of college, looking to find himself while hitchhiking alone in the bush of Alaska. Unfortunately for Chris his well anticipated venture turned fatal after a hundred some days alone in the wilderness. Jon Krakauer uses rhetorical methods for the duration of the book, which allows him to speak of Chris’s life with a sense of certainty. The reader thus trusts Krakauer’s narrative and somewhat understands why a man like Chris could head into unknown territory without a second thought. The author shows his qualification for writing about Chris by making comparisons with his own life and interviewing those close to Chris Krakauer
Jon himself adventured on a similar trek to Chris’s and although his did not end fatally he sees parallels of his life and Chris’s. He believes that “people would have been quick to say of me--as they now say of him--that I had a death wish” (155). But when he decided to go to Alaska, “like Chris McCandless, I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic”(155). Krakauer thus shows his credibility for writing about Chris because he realizes that he went into his travels the same way Chris did. Both men’s decisions were in no doubt questionable but the reader is now able to relate to these men’s kind of desire to find themselves in a new adventure. In addition, he writes, “As a youth {...} I disappointed my father in the