Into The Wild Chris Mccandless Meaning

Journey to the Meaning of Life In the novel Into the Wild, the author Krakauer presents the story of Chris McCandless, a young man who is curious about what he really wants to accomplish in his life. Inspired by his favorite author, McCandless abandons everything he has and departs on a journey to search for the answers to life in order to fulfill his curiosity. Since he is a very smart and logical person, McCandless tries to make sense of everything, including his life. He finds that leaving civilization and connecting with nature really helps him better understand the meaning of life. He believes that life is all about engaging with the environment, rather than with relationships with humans that he refers to as plastic people. Because
From the process of crossing the Mexican border, we can see his spirit of braveness. He never gave up even though crossing the border was not an easy thing to do; rather, he was finally able to figure out the way to cross by paddling a canoe through the dam’s open floodgates and managing to accomplish his trip safely. “Alex finds what he believes to be the Wellteco Canal and heads south. Worries and fears return as the canal grows ever smaller…Local inhabitants help him portage around a barrier… Alex finds Mexicans to be warm, friendly people (Krakauer 35). Crossing the border without being noticed like McCandless is almost unbelievable. It really requires a great plan and courage to take the high risk that McCandless did. Besides his fearlessness, McCandless also embraced steadiness as part of his spirit. For example, McCandless never gave up when he had to wait for days just to hitchhike. “Hitchhiking tends to be difficult on the Alaska Highway… But McCandless experienced no such delay” (Krakauer 158). These experiences show McCandless’s passion to be consistent, which gives him spirit to accomplish what he has started; spirit to be responsible for his own life. Again, this shows how McCandless was able to grow in character as a result of his
In order to fulfill his desire to find what he wants, he leaves his family without bothering about how they feel. His mother, Billie says, “Chris had instructed the post office to hold the letters until August 1, apparently so we wouldn’t know anything was up… it made us very, very worried” (22). McCandless is making a decision to disappear, into the wild, without considering the fact that his parents will be very worried about him. This is really illogical because all children should understand how their parents would feel if someday they left. Moreover, by leaving his current life which could have been filled with a bright future, McCandless shows that he just wants to run away from reality. He is such a coward because he does not want to deal with anything that he supposed to do; rather, he keeps giving reasons for his leaving by saying he wants experiences to understand his life. Actually, in order to make sense of his life, all he has to do is maintaining his current life. Also, the fact that he dies, proves that his journey is about exploring death rather than life. There is no point to go into the wild because it cost him his life. It is the biggest mistake that McCandless could ever