Readers may at first have some trouble sympathizing with Christopher
Johnson McCandless, the
young man whose mysterious
death in the Alaska
wilderness Jon Krakauer explores so movingly in his new
book, 'Into the Wild.'
As Mr. McCandless's story unfolds in these pages, he seems to have been
lacking in both adequate supplies and proper
know-how when he waved
goodbye to a trucker who had given him a lift and tramped off into the
bush on April 28, 1992. What's more, the idealism that prompted this
fatal romantic adventure appears both flawed and badly articulated,
amounting as it does to phrases like 'plastic
people' and the need to
'revolutionize your
life and move into an entirely new realm of
experience,' and cliched affirmations that writers like Tolstoy,
Thoreau and Jack London were leading him on.
What's particularly tough to take is Mr. McCandless's refusal to
tell his devoted family his whereabouts after he graduated with honors
from Emory University in 1990 and set off on his cockeyed hegira. Mr.
Krakauer does not even offer speculation about some heroic psychic
drama his subject might have been unconsciously acting out.
In short, at least at the beginning of 'Into the Wild,'
you share the outraged reactions of so many who read the article by Mr.
Krakauer in Outside magazine from which this book developed. As one
angry Alaskan put it in a letter to the author: 'While I feel for his
parents, I have no sympathy for him. Such willful ignorance . . .
amounts to disrespect for the land, and paradoxically demonstrates the
same sort of arrogance that resulted in the Exxon Valdez spill -- just
another case of under prepared, overconfident men bumbling around out
there and screwing up because they lacked the requisite humility. It's
all a matter of degree.'
Yet if Mr. Krakauer too readily exposes his subject's shortcomings, he
also does a masterly job of keeping the reader's condemnation at bay.
While conceding his subject's many flaws, he keeps hinting that
something was special about this case. He reveals through the eyes of
many who met Mr. McCandless during his flight how particularly
intelligent, unusual and just plain likable this young man was.
He describes Mr. McCandless's many forerunners who were driven
to climb mountains too high, plumb wastelands too deep or brave
elements too unforgiving. He introduces each of his 18 chapters and his
epilogue with quotations from the literature of the wilderness that
often articulate acutely what Mr. McCandless must have been feeling.
What is it that finally pushes you off the fence? On which side
of it do you fall? Yet another skill that Mr. Krakauer displays in his
reconstruction of Mr. McCandless's life and death is that of artfully
withholding the pieces of his puzzle until the last one falls into
place in the final pages. So one hates to give any of the mystery away.
But certainly among the most moving chapters in the book are
the two in which the author discloses why he identified with his
subject so strongly. Here Mr. Krakauer reveals how he too was once the
rebellious son of a loving but overbearing father and how he too acted
out his rebellion by throwing himself into the arms of nature.
More precisely, he decided to plunge himself into the Alaskan
wilderness and climb a mountain, the Devil's Thumb, by a route that had
never been taken before. What follows is a terrifying account of the
author's own desperate venture, full of passages that rival the best in
mountaineering literature. 'A trancelike state settles over your
efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream,' he writes. 'Hours
slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence
-- the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled
opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapfrom your
thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness
of the task at hand.'
Unlike Mr. McCandless, the author survived his mad adventure,
although in his view he probably didn't deserve to. From his experience
he concludes: 'At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a
concept as non-Euclidian geometry or marriage. I didn't yet experience
its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd
entrusted the deceased with their hearts.'
Moreover, 'engaging in risky behavior is a rite of passage in
our culture no less than in most others,' Mr. Krakauer writes. 'It
can be argued that youthful derring-do is in fact evolutionarily
adaptive, a behavior encoded in our genes. McCandless, in his fashion,
merely took risk-taking to its logical extreme.'
Mr. Krakauer himself outgrew his need to take dangerous risks,
and Mr. McCandless apparently was beginning to do the same. Without
giving away too much of the story, one can reveal that eventually he
wanted to come out of the wild
and settle down. But it was too late. In Mr. Krakauer's eloquent
handling, this is not merely sad. Because the story involves
overbearing pride, a reversal of fortune and a final moment of
recognition, it has elements of classic tragedy. By the end, Mr.
Krakauer has taken the tale of a kook who went into the woods, and made
of it a heart-rending drama of human yearning.GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS FROM THE LINK BELOW.
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