75 pages • 2 hours read
Jon KrakauerInto The Wild
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Fairbanks”
Alaska State Troopers had been trying to identify who Chris McCandless was for a week by the time The New York Times published an article about him in 1992. Jim Gallien, the man who gave McCandless a ride to the trailhead, saw an article in the Anchorage Daily News and called the Alaskan State Troopers. The trooper who answered was skeptical that Gallien knew McCandless, but Gallien identified McCandless in police photos.
Wayne Westerberg heard about McCandless’s death over the radio while working in North Dakota. Westerberg called the Alaska State Troopers to tell them what he could about McCandless. Once again, the cops were skeptical at first, but Westerberg provided them with Social Security information that helped authorities reach McCandless’s family. Chris McCandless’s older brother Sam received a call from authorities after he read an article about the death of a hiker in The Washington Post. He was brought into the Fairfax County Police Department and shown a photograph of his brother. Sam confirmed that the dead hiker was Chris McCandless and drove to his parents’ home to tell them the news.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Chesapeake Beach”
Chris McCandless’s father was Walt McCandless. He was bearded, tall, and wore wire-framed glasses. Although he was often controlling and intense, he softened after Chris died. He played piano with jazz musician Charlie Novak in college and earned a master’s degree in antennae theory from the University of Arizona. He married in 1959 and had five children, but he separated from his wife in 1965. Walt started dating his secretary, Billie, and the couple had a son, Chris, in 1968.
When Chris was six, the family moved to Washington, DC, where Walt worked for NASA. A few years later Walt started his own consulting firm with his wife Billie. Their financial resources were often thin, but the family frequently went on camping trips together. Billie’s father Loren was a woodsman and hunting guide, and Chris looked up to him.
Chris performed well in school and enjoyed playing music, but he also chafed against authority figures, such as his high school band leader. Walt says his son was naturally talented in many different things but resistant to being coached and to learning technique.
In high school Chris was the captain of the cross-country team. Teammates remember him leading the team on long, unusual routes on which they would get lost. For Chris, running was both a spiritual and competitive endeavor. He took social justice issues like racial oppression and poverty very seriously, and he attempted to inspire classmates to go to South Africa with him to help end apartheid and to feed the local homeless in DC.
Although he once told his parents that he wouldn’t go to college, Chris ultimately went to Emory University. Chris was ashamed by money and affluence but also had a knack for entrepreneurship. He worked as a salesman for a local contractor in high school and was so successful that the contractor offered to pay for Chris’s college education if he would continue working for him while attending. Chris refused. Instead, that summer he planned to embark on a long cross-country road trip.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Annandale”
After Chris graduated from high school, he went on an extended cross-country road trip, driving from Virginia through Texas and the Southwest, ultimately arriving at the Pacific Coast. During his trip he got lost while wandering the Mojave Desert and became severely dehydrated. Once home, he became angry when his father tried to tell him to be more safe.
The following summer, after a year at Emory University, Chris worked for his father developing computer software. The summer after that he worked as a pizza delivery man. While at home, his relationship with his parents “deteriorated” (121). It turned out that two summers earlier, during his long cross-country road trip, he learned family secrets that changed the way he saw his relationship to his family. Walt had secretly fathered a child with his first wife after giving birth to Chris. Walt ultimately finalized his divorce with Marcia, his first wife, and moved to Annandale with Billie, but Chris only found out about the saga after visiting family friends in California and hearing the stories 20 years later.
Chris became angry when he learned of his father’s past. He told others that the saga made his “entire childhood seem like a fiction” (123). As his anger grew, Chris became more interested in social justice issues. He wrote heated political articles for the Emory school newspaper, and he seemed to become more intense as time wore on.
In his senior year of college Chris became emotionally distanced from his parents, and after graduating he cut off contact with them altogether.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
Whereas Chapters 8 and 9 shed light on McCandless’s motivations by comparing him to other people, Chapters 11 and 12 provide context for his motivations by analyzing his childhood, his upbringing, and his relationship to his parents.
Krakauer describes many of McCandless’s positive traits throughout the book, but in Chapters 11 and 12 he also describes negative traits that ultimately contributed to McCandless’s death. One of those traits is McCandless’s stubbornness. His father Walt says that “if you tried to coach him, to polish his skill, to bring out that final ten percent, a wall went up. He resisted instruction of any kind” (111). Krakauer adds, “Nuance, strategy, and anything beyond the rudimentaries of technique were wasted on Chris” (111). This willfulness ultimately made McCandless resistant to accepting gear, clothes, and advice that might have saved his life.
Krakauer hints that McCandless’s relationship to his father shaped his desire to roam the country, take risks, and eventually head into the Alaska bush. Krakauer says of McCandless’s father, “even from across the room it is apparent that some very high voltage is cracking through his wires. There is no mistaking whence Chris’s intensity came” (105). McCandless also inherited his father’s passion for playing music, his skill at programming computer software, and his enjoyment of hiking and backpacking. But after discovering that Walt had secretly fathered a son with his ex-wife, Chris felt hurt and deceived, and chose to distance himself from his parents. This fact adds another layer of depth to the motivations behind McCandless’s journey. He not only sought beauty, solitude, and spiritual liberation like Everett Ruess and the Irish monks, but Krakauer suggests McCandless was also reacting to the anger he felt toward his parents for their deception.
McCandless was full of contradictions. He was averse to affluence yet a skillful entrepreneur and careful accountant; he was unforgiving of his parents’ behavior yet accepting of others’. McCandless was outspoken on issues of social justice yet also advocated for right-wing political views in college. His trek into the Alaskan wilderness was likewise based on contradictory instincts. He had valuable experience traveling alone and surviving with little, yet he lacked experience and knowledge of the Alaskan terrain. These contradictions are what opened him up to the vehement criticism and enthusiastic adoration that followed in the wake of Krakauer’s article.
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