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Into the Wild, a novel by John Krakauer, catalogs the life, journey, and implications of a young man named Chris McCandless. Walking alone into the Alaskan wilderness, McCandless attempted to live in an abandoned bus through the winter. His subsequent death serves as a springboard for Krakauer to discuss the nature of going “into the wild,” in his own life, and in several other notable figures. By tracing the mental journey that leads people to try themselves against nature, and noting the impacts on their families and friends, Krakauer explains how McCandless and others “couldn’t resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink” (156). The main point of the novel is that there is a certain, indescribable element that draws us out into the wild and out of the confines of society. McCandless heeded that call more than others, but it is an influence that most (especially young men) feel.
Krakauer begins at the end, telling the story of McCandless (going by the name “Alex Supertramp”) hitching a ride with Jim Gallien to the head of the Stampede trail where he intended to embark into the Alaskan wild. Subsequently, he offers a description of how a band of hunters found his body lying in the old bus he was camping in. Next, Krakauer traces his relationship with Wayne Westerberg (a farmer he worked for), as well as his comfortable upbringing in “the comfortable upper-middle-class environs of Annandale, VA” (19). The reaction of his parents, ranging from panic to sorrow, is cataloged intermittently throughout the text. Krakauer also documents his relations with a pair of travelers named Jan and Bob and an isolated older man named Ronald Franz, which provides insight into the unique nature of McCandless and his impact on those around him. To supplement the McCandless narrative, Krakauer pulls from his own experiences in climbing the Devil’s Thumb as a young man, as well as others who have engaged in similar adventures. In doing so, he makes the story more universal and not just a case study on an individual who ended up dead in Alaska. Finally, he explores the actual events that seem to have taken place on the bus and led to McCandless’ demise.
On page 155, Krakauer writes near the conclusion of his account of his journey up Devil’s Thumb: “As a young man, I was unlike McCandless in many important regards; most notably, I possessed neither his intellect nor his lofty ideals. But I believe we were similarly affected by the skewed relationships we had with our fathers. And I suspect we had a similar intensity, a similar heedlessness, a similar agitation of the soul death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage…I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality.” This quote sums up the meaning of the novel: that there is a fundamental part of the soul that yearns for adventure and the wild. Those who choose to tempt death in the way that Krakauer and McCandless did are not concerned with the final ramifications of their actions, but rather the almost spiritual need to explore the dark mystery.
What we learn from the journey of Chris McCandless is the limits of our own mortality. We cannot totally transcend the world that we inherited, regardless of it we find it palatable or not. The call of the wild is a potent, but an ancient whisper of the wind that blows just beyond the border of our consciousness, even though it runs against the better parts of our reason from time to time, During those moments, we seek Truth not because we have logically come to the conclusion that it exists, or have realized a way to discover it using new and advanced modern technology, but precisely because we know it is a mystery that we can never discover.
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