Jon Krakauer's Analysis

wife, Marcia, “long after falling in love with Billie, long after she gave birth to Chris” (Krakauer 121) before moving away from El Segundo.
Considering this discovery, the reasons for Chris’s attitude become more clear. Not only was he at a place he did not want to be without many friends, but the whole time he was there he carried the weight of that discovery with him. The narrator states that “He later declared to Carine that the deception committed by Walt And Billie made his entire childhood seem like fiction” (Krakauer 123). With this being said, one can clearly see that during his time in college, Chris had many issues that he hadn’t dealt with for he was “the sort of person who brooded over things” (Krakauer 121). Along with this,
It seems this was one of the things Chris hoped to gain when embarking on his journey to Alaska. The text states that upon graduating Chris felt he was “emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world he felt grievously cut off from” (Krakauer 22). From this we can see exactly how detached Chris felt from the world. We also get a chance to see the world from Chris’s perspective, which reveals another reason Chris wanted out of society, which was his thoughts about wealth. It is said that “Chris was very much of the school that you should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run” (Krakauer 32) being embarrassed by his parents wealth. The text explains why saying he “believed that wealth was shameful, corrupting, inherently evil” (Krakauer 115). The text also states “he intended to invent an utterly new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience” (Krakauer 22-23). This statement shows us yet another thing McCandless’s life was missing, which is freedom. From this statement it seems that Chris wanted to do things his own way for a change shedding light on the rebellious spirit he had. The fact that he wanted to wallow in unfiltered experience shows that he felt restricted to enjoy different
This turned out to be fatal in the end for Chris. As his death seemed to be a matter of unpreparedness as well as accident. But according to Joseph Kramp his unpreparedness was no fault of his own. He states “his life and horrid death is a witness to how our society is failing our youth today who deeply desire to be apart of communities that help them become accountable to each other’s needs without developing any kind of punitive conscience or need to entirely exit society by venturing into the wilderness” (Kramp 65). This quote is exactly what has been the case with Chris. Instead of his parents seeing what he wanted to do with his life and helping him achieve his aspirations, they tried to steer him in the direction they wanted him to