An Essay on McCandless’s character and role of selfishness in his decision making

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer is about Christopher McCandless who goes on a great expedition into the depths of the forest to find the truth of the world; He hitchhike throughout the America by foot and keeps a journal of his adventure; he makes the road his home and rejects his real home. He is a reader who reads books and romanticizes nature in his ideal naive vision; but unfortunately, his naivety towards nature takes his life away during one of his great expeditions to Alaska. He comes from an upper middle class family with a highly educated background where his unique insight about life makes him dissatisfied with his family’s way of life; he is someone who avoids extraneous hue and only interested in furthering the richness of his soul’s color, not interested in unnecessary extravagance. After graduating from university he started his lone odyssey without telling his family and from an early teenagehood he has a difficult relationship with his family who doesn’t understand him; he desires to learn the truth of himself by sacrificing his relationship with his family. Along the way he encounters people who have pieces of the answers to his questions; he finds pieces of answers among strangers which he could not have found if he had stayed with his family. McCandless as a person is not selfish.

McCandless’ family doesn’t understand him. As stated by McCandless in his letter to his sister, “I’m going to divorce them as my parents once and for all and never speak to either of those idiots again as long as I live” (Krakauer 46). McCandless is a very unique person from an early childhood he had a crave for freedom but being a teenager he couldn’t do anything about it; his family without properly thinking about him arbitrarily sets levels on him which doesn’t fit with what he actually is. He seeks freedom above anything else; his free spirit is beyond what anyone can hope to understand and he is very misunderstood by his family because he seeks freedom so intensely that they don’t understand him; he doesn’t fit with their own perceived idea of a son. His fortune binds him from the bright light of freedom he seeks, they are just obstacles that keep him suffocated into a life predetermined by his parents. He does not enjoy the familial wealth that is attained by the hard works of his family; he simply doesn’t want anything extravagance unlike his parents who understand poverty and how it is like to be poor, McCandless never saw that phase of life; he never experience that, the wealthy comfortable life that’s always all he has seen; but his parents are judging him from their own perspective, from their lens of life. It is not hard to understand McCandless if one tries to put aside their own preconception and try to see what he sees. As Westerberg states when Jon Krakauer interviews him, “ Knowing Alex, I think he must have just got stuck on something that happened between him and his dad and couldn’t leave it be”(Krakauer 46). A stranger like Westerberg who doesn’t know McCandless can tell there is something wrong with him and his family; but his own father and mother with whom he has stayed sixteen to seventeen years couldn’t figure it out; McCandless’ parents are very clever people but never suspected that maybe they are doing something wrong and actually see what their son has been telling them to see for years. McCandless tries to tell them many times that the way they want him to be he can’t be that way, that is not like him at all; so he just gives up on ever convincing them and concludes that there can be no change made in their perception of him. Even though he grew up in a wealthy family he was treated as if he were those kids from the poor working class family where appearance comes first before their child because they don’t have actual wealth other than the show of wealth that they project. They care more about what the relatives will say if their son or daughter don’t become a lawyer or engineer, what their religious community say if their son or daughter don’t grow up to be religious, they would care about themselves more in a sense than their child which contradicted their claim that they do everything for their children not for themselves. They deprived them of freedom while claiming to be the good doer that’s hypocrisy. But the people who McCandless meet on the road are not like that, they seem to be not narrow minded and they see the charm within him and they are fine with him the way he is; they don’t expect him to be something he isn’t and these little understand that make him take the road over his family.

McCandless wouldn’t be free if he stayed with his family. As stated by “he had again evaded the impending…. He had fled the claustrophobic confines of his family”(Krakauer 39). McCandless family can be considered hypocrite and hypocrisy means to be dishonest to oneself; how can someone who is dishonest to themselves be free, they can’t; people who are dishonest can never attain freedom; freedom starts with an honest heart with a clever cunning brain, where they can attain whatever their heart desire through their intelligent and that is freedom. His family lives a life of hypocrite, he father cheats with his mom; he breaks the trust while controlling him by saying everything they are doing is for his own good. His parents don’t want to listen to what he has to say so they make a rigid life for such a free person as McCandless. They want him to have a wife, high paying job, house and a mediocre life that he doesn’t; he has a mother who he can’t connect with, a father who he doesn’t want to be control by, he has a lifestyle that he feels guilty about; he doesn’t want static life like that he just wants to stay away from mediocrity of the mass and conformity of the society; rather he wants to be a free man but unable do anything about it because he was still just a teenager; so when the chance of out of state college enabled him to get away from the unfixable situation he was in and he takes the chance and world hard to get away so he doesn’t have to go back to the same life when he was teenager; after so many years he finally got some freedom from his family for a while and he didn’t want to lose the taste of freedom ever again and he ran away without telling his family about it. He concluded that a family that doesn’t understand and misrepresent his intention there is no need for going back to them; if a family rejects it’s member’s will, then the member can reject the family. It is like a democatic government when the government stops serving the people it becomes obsolete and the people can reject the government. The people don’t necessarily need government but the government does need people; the same is true for family, it is also a social construct the member of a family doesn’t necessarily need family but in order to call someomething family the family needs members. It is good to have a family because it gives security and comfort but it is not necessary for everyone. As McCandless suggests to Franz in his letter, “Ron, in short, get out of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did” (Krakauer 40). In this unfree world it is really hard to be free; people give up their freedom for security and comfort; convenience take over the free will; there very few people who try to go the opposite of the flow of the world, if one tries it is as if they are fighting a already lost battle with fate no matter what they do. McCandless without caring about anything not family, friends, and sister hit the road over everything that is familiar to him. It can said that every human has this tendency to strip free of everything as Franz himself leave his corformatable lifestyle after McCandless suggested him to live a life of vagabond; it just happens to be McCandless had the extreme form of this human desire for free so much so that if he had stayed he could have killed himself of agony, after repetition of same lifestyle for year after year without same and thrill that he seeks in his life. If he had listened to his family he could have fallen into a severe depression and could have ended his life with his own hand, even if he had got married and even if he had stable life, there is chance he could have had an even more miserable life than he did as free man so he chose a life of honor in his sense of the word honor which is dignity of human to preserve its own freedom.

McCandless is undermined by his family. As stated by his father, “I tried to explain that we didn’t object to his travels; we just wanted him to be a little more careful and to keep us better informed of his whereabouts” (Krakauer 83). McCandless was clever and proud of abilities; when he does something he always reflects and improve on himself without being told by anyone; when someone insensitively try to give suggestion to him without knowing that he already knows his mistake and already taking action to improve it; it annoys him being told the things that you already know repeatedly is torture yet many parents are very insensitive about it and gudge someone by simply their age which is wrong, there are teenager who makes better decision than full grown, there are teenager who are more skilled than adult so just judging by age can make people angry; it can make people angrier if they are doing its for sixteen or seventeen years. Parents have tendency of telling their son and daughter they are better than them in life so children should shut up and listen to their parents without objection like clay doll, it becomes any shape based on what the maker wants it shape to be; human are not doll it is really wrong to say that and can be abusive to some kids and every human has pride and nobody likes to be undermined by anyone one. But the stranger McCandless meets on the road are indifferent by the way he is and sometimes he even influence people who are older than him as stated by McCandless, “Astoundingly, the eighty-one-year-old man took the brash twenty-four-year-old vagabonds advice to heart” (Krakauer 41). He was very charming but there was no one in his family other than his sister bother to notice because his parents were busy being practical about life; they didn’t care about their son’s aspiration and great kind affection towards nature. But there are people who did take McCandless advice to live the life of a vagabond to heart and maybe they got a deep glimpse into his heart; haven gave glimpse to his heart to those who where in no position to look deep into it and try to fix the broken heart that is hurt and in pain; the stranger in McCandless life were a bit too late if he had meet someone like them in earlier in his life then he might have done something different; none of McCandless’ peer understood him but they just thought he was strange anomaly; they did even treat him as a close person rather they treated him like a star, with whom no one can go near. Franz didn’t treat McCandless treat McCandless like a zoo artifact; he was impressed by his skill but he treated him just like his other sons and daughter.

McCandless is not a selfish person. People who he meets on his journey repeatedly told Krakauerthat he was a nice kind guy who might be a bit too overconfident; he did things that most people are too scared to do even if deep down sometimes we want to do it; that is one of the reason the Alaskan residence got mad at him because he remind them of their past self bit too much and his death in a signifies their defeat too; they dove bit too deep into McCandless story. He was unfathomably driven with unwavering motivation to keep going, going all the way if he stops now why he started this journey in first place McCandless probably thought like that. He wasn’t selfish, he was just different from everyone else.

Wok citation

Krakauer, Jon. “Into The Wild”. 1996. PDF file.