Romanticism In Into The Wild

In his investigative biography Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer implies that wilderness has come to mean more than survival to the American mind. Krakauer’s stories of his own dangerous and self admittedly “idiotic”(151), adventures into Alaskan wilderness are a great way to tie the message close to the author. In the past authors have held wildly romantic ideals of nature, and its deepest secrets; Into the Wild is a direct contrast to such writing, with dark and truthful representations of the way reckless adventure often turns out. The American mind is infected with disproportionately romanticized ideas of how humans are truly natural beings; this has led to the misadventure or death of many people in the wild. Additionally, Into the Wild details

Notably, Henry David Thoreau often cited nature as the place where humanity can find itself, “This world is but a canvas to our imagination… Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”(Thoreau) Often these same people identify heavily with thoughts and theories supplied by Leo Tolstoy, “Everybody thinks of changing the world but nobody thinks of changing themselves…Boredom: the desire for desires”(Tolstoy). This romantic writing causes wildly different feelings in the general population, with some disregarding its validity, but Chris and many others like him have found these questions so intriguing they decide they must find an answer for

He admits that he himself wasn’t, in his journey up Devil’s Thumb, as were Ruess, McCandless, Rossellini, and many others. Rossellini tries to find the root of human evolution through a quest “to become a Stone Age native” he ultimately fails this quest, and Rossellini “decided to end his life then and in that(chest-stab) manner”(Krakauer, 75). The time and skills required to survive for a long time in the wild are difficult to obtain, and often require practice before being applied in their fullest extent. This is the critical mistake made by Carl McCunn, who didn’t know how to properly signal an SOS, and subsequently failed to flag down help.(Krakauer 80,81) This same condition has cost many their lives, with even a slight lapse in judgment being the end of their life. Krakauer investigated Chris’s preparation and found that he had done plenty of research into survival skills. What ultimately killed Chris and those like him were the desire to be so close to nature, that they didn’t take basic survival tools with them, like a compass, map, and