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.
Themes
Travel as a Mode of Spiritual Pilgrimage
At the end of Chapter 18 Krakauer compares McCandless, as seen in a photo, to a monk: “He is smiling in the picture, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes: Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God” (199). This is the last of many suggestions that McCandless’s journey was motivated by spiritual yearning. At the end of Chapter 9, for example, Krakauer describes the travels of the papar, the Irish monks who emigrated to Iceland for no greater reason than to find solitude and isolation. One arctic explorer suggests that the monk’s dangerous journeys were “undertaken chiefly from the wish to find lonely places, where these anchorites might dwell in peace, undisturbed by the turmoil and temptations of the world” (97).
Krakauer draws an explicit comparison between these monks and McCandless: “Reading of these monks, one is moved by their courage, their reckless innocence, and the urgency of their desire. Reading of these monks, one can’t help thinking of Everett Ruess and Chris McCandless” (97). Rather than being motivated by superficial or arbitrary desires, McCandless’s journey was motivated by a deep search for natural beauty, freedom, and spirituality. In this way he followed in the vein of fellow travelers who went before him, such as Everett Ruess and the papar.
Food as a Sacred Substance
Food plays an important role in the story of Chris McCandless. As he travels, he is given food by strangers such as Jim Gallien and Jan Burres, and he is invited to sit and eat in the home of Wayne Westerberg’s mother. In these situations food binds him with other people and provides him with the opportunity to connect more deeply with those he meets. However, once he is alone in the Alaskan bush, food begins to play a very different role in his life. He is forced to hunt to survive and at one point, he kills a moose, which he fails to preserve correctly. The loss of life strikes him as tragic and changes the way he relates to what he eats. McCandless marks a passage in Thoreau’s Walden, which says, “when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to” (167).
As with Thoreau’s fish, McCandless came to feel that the loss of the moose’s life was not worth the nourishment it provided. McCandless later writes in his journal, “Consciousness of food. Eat and cook with concentration…Holy Food” (168). While in society, the origins of food seem less important, and meals are a means for social connection. But in the solitude of the Alaskan wilderness, food becomes something much more to McCandless, something sacred, profound, and worth deeper reflection.
The Joys of Solitude Versus the Joys of Society
In the last few weeks of his life McCandless wrote in his journal, “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED” (189). The note was written beside a passage from Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, which at one point reads, “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” (189). McCandless’s identification with these words about sharing the joys of life with others is striking because of his extraordinary penchant for solitude. He had spent the past two years traveling across the Western United States and Mexico, largely avoiding prolonged intimacy with others as well as all contact with his parents. He then went nearly four months in Alaska without encountering another person. And yet despite the joy such solitude brought him, in the end it seems McCandless came to value the company of other people just as much as or more than solitude.
Of course, this is only speculation. As Krakauer notes, “It is tempting to regard this latter notation as further evidence that McCandless’s long, lonely sabbatical had changed him in some significant way. […] But we will never know, because Doctor Zhivago was the last book Chris McCandless would ever read” (189).
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