Rhetoric Study

Krakauer creates an appeal to ethos by using strategies that demonstrate his qualifications to write about and make comparisons with McCandless, while also using strategies to establish that McCandless was qualified and sane enough to make his own decisions regarding his Alaskan odyssey. 

One of the main reasons Krakauer wrote this novel was because he feels that he and McCandless have many similar traits, for example:

“As a youth, I am told, I was willful, self-absorbed, intermittently reckless, moody. I disappointed my father in the usual ways. Like McCandless, figures of male authority aroused in me a confusing medley of corked fury and hunger to please. If something captured my undisciplined imagination, I pursued it with a zeal bordering on obsession, and from the age of seventeen until my late twenties that something was mountain climbing” (134). 

This passage appeals to ethos because it describes Krakauer's awareness to McCandless’s personality and recognizes that he is able to write about him because he was a version of him. Ultimately, it allows Krakauer to further develop his belief that McCandless was a rational person with legitimate thoughts and concerns, merely misguided in his journeys.

This passage also appeals to pathos. While Krakauer's and McCandless's decisions may have been questionable, the audience is still able to relate to this sort of yearning for adventure and renewal, thus creating emotional appeal.

In his description of his youth, Krakauer uses powerful words with almost whimsical connotative word pairings. This shows that Krakauer doesn't take himself too seriously. This allows the reader to relate to him more, and therefore to McCandless.