Analysis Of Into The Wild, By Jon Krakauer

The book, Into the Wild, written by Jon Krakauer, is a non-fiction narrative of Chris McCandless’s short but incredibly inspirational life. After graduating from university, Chris gave up his privileged life and took his adventure into the wild in full swing. By living off the land, Chris had pursued a grand odyssey of freedom throughout the American west, Alaska, and Mexico in search of peace, self-discovery, and solitude in almost two years. Tragically, his life ended during his final journey to the Alaskan wildness. To Chris’s tale of derring-do, People’s reactions varied. Some opined their criticism of Chris’s reckless act, some placed Chris’s adventurous lifestyle under close scrutiny, and others praised him as being inspirational

and aspirational. Despite the hubbub over Chris’s demise, Krakauer held his own strong personal conviction that “He wasn’t a nutcase, he wasn’t a sociopath, he wasn’t an outcast. --McCandless was something else—although precisely what is hard to say. A pilgrim, perhaps” (85). After reading the book thoroughly, even with all due respect to Krakauer, I am still awfully reluctant to accept the notion that Chris was a pilgrim in his nature. Frankly speaking, Chris’s personal expedition to Alaska appeared to go on a pilgrimage; however, there are also considerable footprints, anecdotes, and the revelation of his inner thoughts left behind by Chris to flatly contradict or compromise what constitute a true pilgrimage.
First and foremost, the topic of a defined sacred place was never brought up by Chris in his conservation with others, nor mentioned in his private journals.

People, who consider Chris as a pilgrim, might readily point out that Alaska was Chris’s holy site because it was the place he had been dreaming about going for a long time. That claim is not totally baseless and unwarranted. Alaska is not just the place that Chris’s mind had hooked on, but also “Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their lives” (4). But, for Chris, Alaska was not such a primary location that he wanted to search for spiritual faith or religious beliefs, but a practical ground he could try out his ability and venture of living off the land, “He wanted to prove to himself that he could make it on his own, without anybody else’s help”(159). For instance, as soon as Chris arrived Alaska, the first thing he did was not going to any church or religious services, but to the University of Alaska campus in Fairbank to grab a copy of the field guide to the region’s edible plants before setting out for the wildness. Furthermore, except for declaring that “The Great Holiness of FOOD, the Vital Heat” (168) in his journal, Chris also expressed, “Disaster…Rained in. River look impossible. Lonely, scared” (170). How could Chris himself feel lonely and scared in his holy place? The very basic and fundamental definition of a pilgrimage is that it is a religious practice in which a pilgrim goes on a journey to a sacred place. If there was no holy place involved, then a pilgrimage did not

happen.
Additionally, Chris’s quest for adventurous living in the wildness actually seemed more like a ramble than a purposed journey. At the beginning, there was the implication that what motivated Chris to pack and run away was his sour relationship with his “disrespectful” parents, according to his complaint to his sister, Carine, “Since they won’t ever take me seriously, for a few months after graduation I’m going to let them think they are right, I’m going to let them think that I’m ‘coming around to see their side of things’ and that our relationship is stabilizing. And then, once the time is right, with one abrupt, swift action I’m going to completely knock them out of my life. I’m going to divorce them as my parents once and for all and never speak to either of those idiots again as long as I live. I’ll be through with them once and for all, forever” (64). And then, during the last two years of his life, Chris really lived like a lone vagabond, hitchhiking around the West, sleeping at wherever allowed, taking employment sporadically, and even canoeing all way down to Mexico. Only personal freedom, solitude, the wildness thrilled Chris the most, as in his letter to Wayne Westerberge to elaborate his tramping lifestyle, “As for me, I’ve decided that I’m going to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up” (33). Conspicuously, the thought of a pilgrimage was not the thing that crossed his mind. Actually, even the site of the old bus beside the Sushana River Chris chose to settle down for his Alaska adventure was not the last stop of his tramping journey he initially planned, “I might walk all the way to the Bering Sea” (164), as he told Jim Gallien. For a pilgrim, every step, not randomly picked, taken along the journey to the holy land has special meaning, and each step advanced makes it closer to the final destination. Yet, by mapping out Chris’s adventurous journey physically or connecting the dots of his vagabond route mentally, there was no such clear pattern or a single excursion pointed toward a particular direction or final location that Chris was on the way consistently and persistently. He just roamed the wild on impulse.
Undeniably, Chris is a person who lived a life with some righteous ideologies and high morals, and especially he had been profoundly influenced by Tolstoy’s asceticism. Essentially, asceticism centers on the doctrine that an individual should live a frugal, abstinent, and austere life in pursuit of spiritual or religious goals. Since Chris transformed himself into a died-hard follower of asceticism in college, he had faithfully followed the exact principles of asceticism wherever he went and whatever he did. In his daily life, “Chris was very much of the school that you should own nothing except what you can carry on” (32), as his mother observed. Regarding money, although Chris displayed the unusual talent of making money and being an entrepreneur in his early years, he never hesitated to divest himself of any money, either through donation to charity or burning them into ashes, because owning money had become a symbol of sinful self-indulgence and material pleasure to the eye of an ascetic Chris. Also, most likely in name of asceticism, Chris felt an enormous amount of animosity toward his father as Walt’s bigamy secret was brought to light, “he’d been a bigamist at one time—and that kind of went against Alex’s grain”(159). Undoubtedly, that explained the reason why the relationship between Chris and his folks was so unpleasant and hostile. Then, even his parents’ offer to buy him a new car as a graduation gift was considered by Chris as a malicious deed of “They will think they have bought my respect” (21). In a strict sense of asceticism, the trek that led Chris to the Alaska’s wildness was actually a massive undertaking of his ascetical exercise, eking out a remarkably frugal living in the wildness in search of self-discovery. Therefore, the undertaking was by no mean a part of an envisioned pilgrimage, which emphasizes on a journey to a sacred destination.
Important to know, nowadays there has been an insidious trend or fashion in which many people use the word of pilgrimage so liberally to define their numerous endeavors, such as cultural pilgrimage and spiritual pilgrimage. Traveling is the epitome of the cultural pilgrimage, and a mind meditation exemplifies a case of the spiritual pilgrimage. And roughly, Chris’s personal saga could also be classified into the category of cultural or spiritual pilgrim or the combination of both. Whether such liberal use of the definition of pilgrimage in our daily life is appropriate or not is hard to say; nevertheless, such excessive application of the word of pilgrimage not just overly inflates the concept of a pilgrimage, but also substantially dilutes its religious significance. We’d better just leave the word of pilgrimage alone in the religious dictionary. Understandably, Krakauer, with a similar life experience as Chris’s in their younger years, might have the intent, subtle but sincere, of trying to ennoble Chris in a way of respecting such a brave and dedicated young man who died so young, as well as endorsing his own legendary life . There’s no argument here: Chris was a good man with virtuous consciousness and noble characters; but, simply by the definition, he was not a pilgrim in this set of circumstances. Maybe next time, I should call myself a pilgrim when I go back to visit my hometown in China? Perhaps, not.