Into the Wild Essay

Finding One’s Self

      In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. Mckinley. He was Christopher Johnson McCandless, a bright recent graduate of Emory University. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters. “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer explored the life of Chris McCandless and brought to readers a clearer picture of McCandless’s background, so that we can attempt to answer the question that has left many puzzled: “Why did Chris McCandless go into the wild?”
      Sometimes when a person is pushed over the edge by our materialistic society to discover his/her true roots, the only way that he or she can find him or herself is by going back to nature, where monetary status was not important. In an increasingly crowded world, it was difficult for McCandless to find the physical isolation he sought, but his inward journey was more important than his external surroundings. Thus, Chris McCandless decided to leave all his possessions and began a trek across the Western United States, and to the region which many had deemed wilderness – Alaska.
      McCandless, an intelligent young man to say the least, was frustrated with orders from anyone. He wanted to do things his way or no way and he did this throughout his life. Whether it was getting an F in physics because he refused to write lab reports a certain way (an F was something that was never on McCandless report card) or not listening to advice from his parents to the extreme of leaving society to go into the wilderness, McCandless was definitely not a follower. In Chris’s early years, his parents were told by one of his teachers that “Chris marches to a different drummer" (107). Chris never lost his ability to do things the way...