Chris Mccandless Flaws

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Shaun Callarman’s commentary on the Chris McCandless character from Into the Wild opens with a damning assessment. According to Callarman, McCandless was arrogant, stupid, ill-informed, and, most importantly, he allowed his romantic imagination of spending time in the wilderness to create unrealistic expectations, and then to leave him dangerously unprepared. While Callarman attempts to provide some contextualisation – McCandless was young and nave, and his mistake was approaching a few months in the wilderness as a spiritual practice – on the whole, his critique comes across as a chastisement. ‘He was also physically fragile, making any punishment beyond basic discomfort from the cold pointless,’ Callarman writes. ‘And he made numerous mistakes because of his stupidity, overconfidence, and fearfulness.’ Callarman dismisses any admiration for courage or ideals, it seems – he believes that McCandless ‘was just plain crazy’. In order to evaluate Callarman’s claim, let us turn to McCandless’s journey and review its components and weaknesses. I partially agree with Callarman’s claim, but I also believe that it overlooks certain important features of McCandless as a character and of his motives. …show more content…

McCandless left what remained of his supplies to survive, naively assumed he could find consistently fresh berries, failed to gain survival training, and left without the essential equipment for well-planned travel in an inaccessible area, such as a detailed map, all of which indeed point to some level of failed planning and a failure to appreciate the challenges he’d entangled himself

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