Timothy Treadwell was a bear enthusiasts. He lived with the grizzly bears of Katmai National Park in Alaska for thirteen summers. Timothy was an odd guy, he lived with the bears, he played with the bears, and he practically wanted to be a bear. Timothy said that he hated modern civilization, he was antisocial and on multiple occasions said he hated humans. He felt better being out in the open away from society. Timothy and I are two completely opposites. His views on the world are so different from mine. The main differences between Timothy Treadwell and me are the lifestyle, education, and values.
Timothy lived a very common life. He was born in Long Island, New York where he lived most of his life with his parents and four of his siblings.
…show more content…
At a very young age, Timothy was fascinated with bears. He had dozens of bears in his room growing up. I in the other hand was born in California and have four brothers and sisters. In one of the interviews of the movie Grizzly Man, his parents said how he was an ordinary boy until he graduated high school and went to college. Once in college, his whole perspective of the world changed. He lied saying that he was a British orphan that was born in Australia His parents said he began to experimenting with illegal drugs and then, later on, became an alcoholic when he lost the role in a sitcom called Cheers. My parents consider me to be a good son and student. I never got into trouble growing up. I was always responsible and knew what I had to do. Once in college, I knew that I had to start acting like an adult and take care of the responsibilities that I had. Timothy found his way out of alcoholism thru grizzly bears, he said he wanted to protect the bears from hunters. As a result of Timothy’s lifestyle, education wasn’t a priority to him. Even though he graduated from high school with good grades and from Bradley University, Timothy was more interested in the bears than anything else. I graduated from high school with a 3.0 GPA and now attending a community college, where I spend most of my days studying and doing my homework. He spent years and years learning about the grizzly bears. He would watch and write down anything that bears would do. He spent days reading and observing the bears. He was extremely educated on bears. Most of my days are spent in a lecture room trying to write as many notes as and I can. In addition, Timothy valued life in a different way than me.
He thought that bears were more important than humans. In many occasions, he said that he hated humans and would rather be alone that to socialize with humans. Meanwhile, I value every single second of life. I think that it is healthy to socialize with people. It seems like Timothy would keep everything inside and wouldn’t like to share with the world what was going on with him. In some parts of the movie Grizzly Man, it seemed like he was selfish. He would only focus on him and on the bears, he wouldn’t care about anybody else. Somehow he was able to convince his girlfriend at the time to go with him to document the bears. He was so focused on bears that he didn’t pay attention that his girlfriend was afraid of the bears and didn’t want to go. I would consider myself to be a person that likes to socialize with people, I have to be speaking with someone at all times. Part of me is selfish but not to the extent that Timothy took it. I would never force someone to come with me to a place that they might be scared off. Timothy practically isolated himself from society because he thought that society wasn’t giving him what he needed. Timothy didn’t ask for help, he wanted to experience and do everything by himself. In my case I always need someone, it doesn’t matter if it’s something small or big. Socializing with people is important for your mind and for your health. The way Timothy valued life was not healthy, his
obsession with bears was taking over him. I value life in the way that I like to care for other people and not just myself.
All three adventurers displayed their affection for the wilderness through how they lived after leaving society. After reaching Fairbanks, Alaska, McCandless set up his camp and began to live off the wildlife nearby. In his journal, he noted what he caught each day and showed his gratefulness through his writing font. He believed that “it [wildlife] was morally indefensible to waste any part of an animal that has been shot for food” (166). He tried his best to preserve the animals he shot for food, which in turn displayed his thoughts of nature as something precious.
Chris McCandless was a young man who did everything in his power to try and represent that freedom he was searching for. McCandless had everything before we went out but he decided to go out and travel by choice. He was considered a selfish man because when someone offered him to help him he rejects it in a nice way since we wants to do things himself. In the book Into the wild he states that,"You don't need to worry about me. I have a college education. I'm not destitute. I'm living like this by choice."
As portrayed in the film, Into the Wild, Chris McCandless hates society. In one particular scene, Chris starts yelling about “society” and how it is bad when he is telling Wayne about his trip to Alaska. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem, Self-Reliance, it says “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, b...
The epigraphs presented by Krakauer before each chapter of the memoir Into the Wild dive deep into the life of Chris McCandless before and after his journey into the Alaskan wilderness. They compare him to famous “coming of age characters” and specific ideas written by some of his favorite philosophers. These give the reader a stronger sense of who Chris was and why he made the decision to ultimately walk alone into the wild.
He chose to live deliberately to find real happiness. While living in college, Chris lived off campus in a spartan like apartment, with a couple of crates, electricity and water. After graduating college, he left behind a middle class life full of education and materialistic items to set out on a adventure that would allow him to go into the wild to find his true self. What most people in society would call crazy. A quote from Henry David Thoreau says, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” (Walden) Thoreau is saying that people should live a simple life, with out the material possessions controlling their happiness. Chris understood that materialism doesn’t create real happiness and satisfaction. He gave up the comfort of his home to go out to the wild. He gives away his possessions, something society values too much . He gives his money to charity and burns the money he has left in his wallet. He began a simply life hitchhiking, finding food and shelter in the wild and being adventurous with the land and sights around him. In this way making a statement that he rejects the social views and values of property in the search of a higher purpose within
Living in the wilderness is difficult, but understanding the meaning of such lifestyle is even more difficult. One of the Christopher’s admirable qualities was that he was well aware of what he was doing. He knew about the difficulties and dangers that he would face into the wilderness, and was mentally prepared for that. Author Jon Krakauer says that “McCandless was green, and he overestimated his resilience, but he was sufficiently skilled to last for sixteen weeks on little more than his wits and ten pounds of rice. And he was fully aware when he entered the bush that he had given himself a perilously slim margin for error. He knew precisely what was at stake” (182). McCandless was an educated youth, who loved nature and dreamed of living in the Alaskan wilderness. Although he ignored to take many necessary things with him on this
Into the Wild, written by John Krakauer tells of a young man named Chris McCandless who 1deserted his college degree and all his worldly possessions in favor of a primitive transient life in the wilderness. Krakauer first told the story of Chris in an article in Outside Magazine, but went on to write a thorough book, which encompasses his life in the hopes to explain what caused him to venture off alone into the wild. McCandless’ story soon became a national phenomenon, and had many people questioning why a “young man from a well-to-do East Coast family [would] hitchhike to Alaska” (Krakauer i). Chris comes from an affluent household and has parents that strived to create a desirable life for him and his sister. As Chris grows up, he becomes more and more disturbed by society’s ideals and the control they have on everyday life. He made a point of spiting his parents and the lifestyle they lived. This sense of unhappiness continues to build until after Chris has graduated college and decided to leave everything behind for the Alaskan wilderness. Knowing very little about how to survive in the wild, Chris ventures off on his adventure in a state of naïveté. It is obvious that he possessed monumental potential that was wasted on romanticized ideals and a lack of wisdom. Christopher McCandless is a unique and talented young man, but his selfish and ultimately complacent attitude towards life and his successes led to his demise.
McCandless used the idea of escaping society from “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau and tried to mesh it together with the ideas of solitude and isolation to form his own beliefs. McCandless misinterpreted what Thoreau was saying. Thoreau states, “I had not lived there a week…It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open.” (Thoreau 3).Thoreau specifically states in this quote that he does not want others to follow or even go do what he did. He also did build the cabin a few miles away from a town because he knew he would go back one day. Thoreau was a sane person in doing this because crazy people stray too far away from society despite the consequences. He believed that he had other things to do with his life and not spending a minute more in that lifestyle. McCandless still went out into the wilderness away from society against Thoreau’s words. Chris was crazy to shun s...
He went through many obstacles that could have proved fatal. From canoeing in the Colorado River to picking the right berries, he was testing his intelligence. Chris had a true confidence in the land and in himself to set out on a mission so dangerous. “Wilderness appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his works. It not only offered an escape from society but also was an ideal stage for the Romantic individual to exercise the cult that he frequently made of his own soul. The solitude and total freedom of the wilderness created a perfect setting for either melancholy or exaltation” (Nash; Krakauer 157). Chris longed to escape from society and rely on only mother nature. An innumerable amount of people desire to withdraw from society as Chris did; but they are so comfortable and secure with a normal life they do not dare take such a gutsy
Chris McCandless does not wish to follow defined life structure that society enforces to simply be alive, instead, he chooses to take a seek a path to live a life with purpose. Such an eagerness to seek detachment from what is expected by society, is enforced by not only McCandless but also Thoreau. A primary factor resembling this, is McCandless’ view that many people “live within unhappy circumstances...yet will not change…they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism...damaging to the adventurous spirit(40).” The detesting tone risen through the confliction of “unhappy circumstances” and “damage,” to “safety, conformity and conservation,” emphasis his will to separate from a lifestyle lacking change. This is done
The book Into The Wild, written by Jon Krakauer, tells the story of Chris McCandless a young man who abandoned his life in search of something more meaningful than a materialistic society. In 1992 Chris gave his $ 25,000 savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, and burned all of his money to chase his dream. Chris’s legacy was to live in simplicity, to find his purpose, and to chase his dreams. Chris McCandless’s decision to uproot his life and hitchhike to Alaska has encouraged other young adults to chase their dreams. Neal Karlinksy illustrates the love Chris had for nature in the passage, “He was intoxicated by the nature and the idea of a great Alasican adventure-to survive in the bush totally alone.”
Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Jon Krakauer’s Into The Wild, and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man all tell the stories of a real-life character that makes the decision to venture out into the wilderness on his own. On one hand, Chris McCandless (Into The Wild), Timothy Treadwell (Grizzly Man), and Thoreau are similar in several ways. All three men record some kind of documentation about their journey; McCandless and Thoreau keep journals while Treadwell keeps a video log. Also, all three forced themselves to really live off the land using only the bare minimum of essentials. On the other hand, the men had several differences. In two of the stories, Into The Wild and Grizzly Man, the main character perishes as a result of his choice to live this way, while in Walden, Thoreau survives all the way through his experience. However, the most prominent differences between the characters were their reasons for venturing into the wild in the first place. Henry David Thoreau went into the woods “because [he] wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if [he] could learn what it had to teach, and not, when [he] came to die, discover that [he] had not lived” (Thoreau, Chapter II). His goal was to live his life simply yet richly in the wilderness. Chris McCandless went into the woods for a similar yet different reason. McCandless was opposed to living life the traditional way. He went into the wild to escape society and the traditional way of life. He wanted to prove to himself that he could survive out in the wild away from everything and everyone else. Finally, Timothy Treadwell makes his journey into the Alaskan wild for what he says is the protection of the bear population. His goal is to protect the bears fr...
The novel “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer goes into great detail to describe the main character, Chris McCandless, who died traveling alone into the Alaskan wilderness. McCandless, whom in the novel renamed himself Alex, left his home and family to travel to Alaska in 1992. In Alaska McCandless planned to live an isolated life in the desolate wilderness, but unfortunately he did not survive. This non-fiction novel portrays his life leading up to his departure and it captures the true essence of what it means to be “in the wild”.
...can be a life-changing experience. McCandless entered the wild as an overly confident hitchhiker and left as a self-accepting and humble man. He thought that human relationships were futile, he was impervious to materialism, and that he could understand nature on a scientific level. However, McCandless left the wild with a newfound appreciation for humanity, some clarity on his purpose in life, and the ability to create his own legacy. Many people finish reading Into the Wild and form negative opinions about McCandless’ reckless behavior. However, it is important to focus on how being in the wild brought McCandless closer to understanding himself. Into the Wild should motivate humans to participate in explore the wilderness to discover the true meaning of life.
Since I was little, my family has taught me how to be humble. My family and I are adventurist and we like going out camping and having different experiences in each place we go. At the age of six, I experienced camping for the first time, it was scary at first but eventually it became more comfortable and I loved it. My childhood consisted of similar experiences, but it was not until age 16 when I understood what it was like to be in a calm place. I liked the feeling of being able to get away from society for a couple of days and have the opportunity to shake some stress away. It also meant no homework and no worries because I found an interior peace in a place where nothing more exists than the beauty of nature. Now, when I think about society I find myself in a more stressed mood, with many things to do and having to deal with some people. McCandless was a young man who believed that being around society can be poisonous and is a trap, that the hypocrisy and arrogance of the people had not end. Especially because he was not materialistic when it came to possessions such as cars or houses. Something that caught my attention is his ideologies about nature, his courage to go into the wild alone and the way he was fascinated by the nature, the sky and the small joys of life.