Into the wild

Into the Wild Essay “I don’t want to know what time it is. I don’t want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters.” (Krakauer, 1996, p.7) Christopher McCandless states to Jim Gallien, the driver, who takes McCandless to the edge of Denali National park as he is departing to walk deep into the Alaskan terrain, “to live off the land for a few months.” (Krakauer, 1996, p.4) The questions are, what was he looking for and did he find it. Chris was the type of person who hated the idea of being told what to do and how to do it; he exceled in everything that he did making him extremely over confidant. When McCandless was in school he earned more than excellent grades and he was an athlete. The only bad grade that Chris ever earned was in his physics class when he failed to complete the correct style of lab reports. McCandless though the way the format was set up was stupid so he did them his own way, the teacher warned him the first few times, then started to fail him. The thing is, McCandless had all of the work, and he just didn’t do it correctly. Then with his sports, he excelled in everything, but his true calling was cross country running. He was the captain of his team during high school and during one of his runs he took the team through the hills and tried to get them lost. He did that a lot, go on long runs and have the whole team race back to the school. Then when Chris finally graduated from high school then later on college, he donated all of his money for law school to charity and vanished. McCandless went on a trip previously to the Mojave Desert and almost perished due to dehydration. When he came back home his mother, Billie, was so upset and cooked everything they had to get some weight on him because he was so skinny. Then his father, Walt, talked to him and it made Chris want to leave again. He was looking for an escape. He just wanted to live in the natural world where money is not the ruler. Every time that Chris left something behind; his car, money, family, friends; he became more and more separated from the modernized world. He did not want to make any human bonds with the people that he meat; he didn’t accept ant gifts only food and a place to stay. When he had jobs he never gave his true information to his employers. Chris wanted to become completely isolated with humans; he just wanted it to be him and the wild. All Chris wanted was to escape from conformity and to be himself without other people’s influences trying to change that.