Chris Mccandless: Heroic Journey Or A Suicide Attempt?

821 Words2 Pages

Ameen Khan
Mrs. Lavin
English
04 September 2017
Heroic Journey or a Suicide Attempt?
In April of 1992 a young man named Chris McCandless made a daring journey into the wilderness of Alaska. Chris left his family and all of his belongings at home and left without anyone knowing. All alone Chris ventured out into the wild with minimal resources and the knowledge to survive. The harsh wilderness caused a very misfortunate end for Chris’s life. If Chris had any sense why would he go out in such a remote area with almost no humans? Due to Chris’s unknown knowledge of the wilderness was the probable cause he ended up dead. Peter Christian believes that because of Chris’s stubbornness and lack of knowledge it caused him to fail. In the book Into …show more content…

What Chris McCandless did was just “stupid, tragic and inconsiderate…He spent very little time learning how to live in the wild” (Christian). If Chris was more prepared he could have been able to leave out of the way he came from. If Chris was able to make it back to the bus he could have followed the path back to the highway. Chris had a death wish and it was fulfilled. Of all the people the author could have done it on why Chris? Chris was not special in the fact that he ventured out into the Alaskan wilderness unprepared, hundreds of people run away from something and do exactly what Chris did. The only difference is that some people still have a will to live, they are prepared to survive out in the harsh terrain. “In fact, Alaska is populated with people who are either running away from something or seeking themselves in America's Last Frontier. It is a place very much like the frontiers of the old west where you can come to and reinvent yourself. In …show more content…

No child should ever have to go through that. According to Chris’s sister their home was full of physical and verbal domestic violence. All of this domestic violence caused chris to become mentally ill. He never felt like he belonged anywhere so he decided to venture out into alaska. ‘I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference”(Frost). Chris Mccandless made a choice to go out into the wild. He could have done something else but he chose to kill himself my going into the wild. According to Jon Krakauer “London's fervent condemnation of capitalist Society, is glorification of the primordial world his championing of the great unwashed-- all of it mirrored Mccandless's passions mesmerised by London turgid portrayal of life in Alaska and the Yukon McCandless read and reread the “Call of the Wild”, “White Fang”, “To build a Fire”, An odyssey of the North”, he was enthralled by these tales however that he seem to forget they were works of fiction constructions of the imagination that had more to do with London's romantic sensibilities then with the actualities of life in the subarctic Wilderness.”(Krakauer 44). Chris Mccandless had the illusion that going out into the wild would be easier than it was but it wasn't. Reading all of these books even the author starts to doubt his impromptu

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