Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Grew Up… in suburban Washington D.C, with his parents and younger sister. Christopher was born with the spirit of adventure in him; at age 4, he walked six blocks away from home in the middle of the night and was found in a random house raiding the sweets cabinet. He frequently witnessed the wrath of his father, a NASA engineer, upon his mother. In high school he learned that he and his sister were bastard children, that his mother was his father’s second wife and former mistress. He never told his parents he knew this.
Living… exploring America by any mode of transportation, whether it is his beloved Datsun, foot, boxcar, or kayak. Chris adopted the alter ego Alexander Supertramp, donated his savings, which amounted to $24 thousand, to OxFam, and roamed such places as South Dakota, Arizona, Mexico (where he lived in a cave for 36 days), California, and finally to rural Alaska, where he now lives.
Profession… unemployed. Chris doesn’t believe in careers, despite the fact that he was an A-student at Atlanta’s prestigious Emory University. On the road, he’s squeaked by with such jobs as working the corn fields in South Dakota and selling books in the Mojave Desert.
Interests… reading. Chris is a voracious reader. Some of his favorite authors include Tolstoy, Jack London, Thoreau, and Lord Byron.
Relationship Status… single. Chris is an avowed loner and content to be single for the most part. He does forge a bond with one girl during he travels, a young singer/songwriter named Tracy Tatro whom he meets in the small desert town of Slab City, California.
Challenge… surviving alone without provisions, an axe, or a map in the Alaskan wilderness. But Chris’ grand adventure in the west was always spiritual and/or philosophical in nature. In adventure he seeks freedom and the truth, to discover himself, and to gain new experiences in “the most ancient of human conditions.” In his journal he writes of himself: “No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.”
Personality… kind, idealistic, and passionate. He describes himself as “an extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road.” He is an anti-materialist who wants more than anything to actualize his belief system. According to his sister, he measures “himself and those around him by a fiercely vigorous moral code.”
Get to Know him in...
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The true story of top student and athlete, Christopher McCandless, who after graduating from Emory University in 1992, abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska to live in the wilderness.
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In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild. Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and , unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild. Jon Krakauer constructs a clarifying prism through which he reassembles the disquieting facts of McCandless's short life. Admitting an interst that borders on obsession, he searches for the clues to the dries and desires that propelled McCandless. Digging deeply, he takes an inherently compelling mystery and unravels the larger riddles it holds: the profound pull of the American wilderness on our imagination; the allure of high-risk activities to young men of a certain cast of mind; the complex, charged bond between fathers and sons. When McCandless's innocent mistakes turn out to be irreversible and fatal, he becomes the stuff of tabloid headlines and is dismissed for his naiveté, pretensions, and hubris. He is said to have had a death wish but wanting to die is a very different thing from being compelled to look over the edge. Krakauer brings McCandless's uncompromising pilgrimage out of the shadows, and the peril, adversity , and renunciation sought by this enigmatic young man are illuminated with a rare understanding--and not an ounce of sentimentality. Mesmerizing, heartbreaking, Into the Wild is a tour de force. The power and luminosity of Jon Krakauer's stoytelling blaze through every page. From the Trade Paperback edition.
