Theme: Man's Call to the Wild

The allure of danger is a central theme in Into the Wild. Krakauer does not believe that this allure is significant to everyone, but rather to a specific kind of young man. This young man is one who is in passionate, ambitious, and intense, but not wholly satisfied with or approving of the opportunities and challenges society presents to him. These young men also always seem to have some kind of negative driving force compelling them to act a certain way. McCandless's driving force is his troubled relationship with his father.

"I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life." –Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness

McCandless is a Tolstoy enthusiast. He has read almost all his books, and often recommends them to others whom he deeply respects and admires. This quote depicts his restlessness with society, and his eagerness to get out into the world to do what he really loves. However, the risk in his activities often brings him only one mistake away from death. For this reason, he has to focus utterly and urgently, thus allowing him to escape from the problems that would otherwise eat away at him. The thrill of pure accomplishment also accompanies McCandless's unpredictable lifestyle, which makes him to feel that he truly knows what he is capable of, that he doesn’t need to rely on others or society to survive in his man vs. nature vs. himself struggle.

Image Study

This is a photograph of the beautiful Alaskan wilderness–what McCandless was expecting to come to on his Alaskan odyssey. However, he quickly learns that surviving on the bare minimum is not as romantic as he thought it would be, and that nature is harsh and unforgiving.

This picture represents McCandless's liberation from materialism and society. This shot is merely from the film adaptation of the book, as McCandless did not actually burn his social security card. He did, however, burn his money at one point in the novel.

Throughout his childhood, McCandless was embarrassed by his parents' wealth even though they both have known poverty, worked hard to gain what they had, and weren’t flashy about it. He thinks wealth is inherently evil, even though he is a natural salesman and capitalist from early on.

McCandless insists that his parents are too materialistic, and declares that he'll never be as greedy as he believes them to be. He lives by his anti-materialistic principles, giving away all of his life savings to charity, only earning the bare minimum of money that he needs to survive. "Chris was very much of the school that you should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run" (23).

These images are shots from the movie adaptation of the book, directed by Sean Penn. In each of these pictures, McCandless–played by actor Emile Hirsch–portrays a strong emotion. In some it's sheer joy and jubilation, while in others it's sorrow or anger. The image as a whole represents both McCandless's physical and emotional journey across the North American continent. He set out not only to escape what he views as the twisted ideals of society, but to find out who he really is. With almost no one around to influence his thoughts and emotions, McCandless discovers a strong sense of self and an inner-peace.

While reading the book Doctor Zhivago, McCandless made many scribbled, excited notes in the margins and underlined several passages. Next to a paragraph that read, "And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness...And this was most vexing of all," he noted, "HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED" (129).

 

This can be interpreted to mean that upon his return to civilization, McCandless planned to abandon the life of a solitary vagabond, to stop avoiding intimacy, and to reinstate his position as a member of the human community. We will never know for sure. 

One thing's certain, is that McCandless went out into the wilderness to experience the ultimate adventure and to find what he was searching for. He found it both in nature and in his heart. He realized that while these wonderful feelings and experiences will still exist in solitude, they are best shared with a human companion.

Themes from American Literature

The American Frontier

In American literature, the American Frontier is often depicted as a land of opportunity, where people go to create a new beginning. In Into the Wild, McCandless views the wilderness as a purer state, a place free of the evils of modern society, where he can live by his own rules; a place where he can find out what he is really made of. This makes the wilderness very alluring to McCandless, and many others like him.

However, he discovers that living in and off the wilderness is not as romantic as he imagined it to be. McCandless spends so much time searching for food to sustain himself that he has little time to sit back and appreciate his surroundings. This is evident in his journal entries, which almost entirely consist of lists of the food he finds and eats every day.

Individuality

McCandless describes what he is looking for on his adventure as “ultimate freedom.” This exhibits his desire for freedom from other people's rules and authority over him, as he finds authority particularly oppressive. He believes that the only way to combat this is to lead a life of solitude, in a world where the only laws he chooses to abide by are the laws of nature.

Yet this level of freedom is inherently selfish. No matter how principled and deeply-thought, McCandless is ultimately living solely for his own best interests. A prime example of this is his refusal to obtain a hunting license because he doesn’t think what he eats is the government’s business. If everyone acted this way, animal populations would be destroyed, and food supplies threatened. Therefore, McCandless's "ultimate freedom" is limited, for on any larger scale it would be harmful to the environment.

The Father-Son Relationship

The father-son relationship, and the potential for dysfunction within it, is an important theme in Into the Wild and other American literary works. The problem arises in that McCandless's father's ambitions for his son are very different from McCandless's own, and their strong wills and passion cause a schism between father and son. McCandless dies before he has the opportunity to grow out of his anger.

Materialism

McCandless denounces and rejects what he sees as American materialism. He condones the upper middle-class suburban setting in which his parents raised him. He lives by his principle that the only necessities are what you can carry on your back, and upon leaving his Atlanta home he donates all his savings to charity, abandons his car in the desert, and burns his money.

Un-American Dream?

The American Dream–a set of ideals in which freedom includes the opportunity for success and prosperity achieved through hard work–does not exist in Into the Wild. McCandless had everything: wealth, looks, athletic ability, and a very high intelligence level. "I have a college education. I’m not destitute. I’m living like this by choice” (51). In this way, McCandless went about the American Dream (or his own dream, rather) on an opposite route. He started with everything, and ended with nothing instead of starting with nothing and ending with everything. He just wanted an easier, simpler life.
McCandless's story is about a young man's journey to find himself in a world full of misdirection. He hoped that by parting ways with his old life, he would stumble across himself somewhere on the North American continent.

About the Author and the Book

In January 1993, a few months after Chris McCandless's body was recovered, Jon Krakauer published an article in Outside magazine reporting on the puzzling circumstances of the young man's death. The article garnered a great deal of attention, and Krakauer found himself fascinated with the question of what led McCandless to this extreme end. "I was haunted by the particulars of the boy's starvation and by vague, unsettling parallels between events in his life and those in my own", he explains in his Author's Note of Into the Wild.

This personal connection led Krakauer to do three years of research in an effort to uncover the story behind McCandless's death. He interviewed McCandless's family, friends, and people McCandless came across in his two years on the road. He also had access to McCandless's books, journals, photographs, and the letters he sent and received. Using this and additional information about McCandless's childhood and time at college, Krakauer was able to piece together much of what drove McCandless to his rootless existence, and what he did during that time.

Into the Wild is the result of this extensive research, and was published in 1996. The book also discusses Krakauer’s own history, as he "interrupt[s] McCandless's story with fragments of a narrative drawn from [his] own youth", as well as the stories of many other famous or infamous figures who met their ends in the wilderness.

The book amounted great success, spending more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list and adapted to a movie in 2007. Still, controversy arose over Krakauer's diagnosis of what exactly had killed McCandless. In the Outside magazine article, he wrote that McCandless had mistaken the poisonous wild sweat pea for the nearly indistinguishable edible wild potato, and thus had inadvertently poisoned himself. This was what almost all journalists at the time also believed. However, when the potatoes from the area around the bus were later tested in a laboratory, toxins were not found. Krakauer subsequently modified his hypothesis, suggesting that mold on the potato seeds may have caused McCandless to become very sick. This theory was also proved false as no mold was found, and to this day there is no conclusive evidence that explains McCandless's death.