Jon Krakauer Essay for All Adventure Literature Lovers

English 224: Fact, Truth and Fiction

Greatest American literary works of the twentieth century, such as from Herman Melville’s Moby –Dick, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and William Faulkner to Jon Kraukaur’s Into the Wild published in 1992 have always expressed strong disillusionment, depression and a desire to escape from the present conditions into the wild or alternative world. Leslie Fiedler identified that the central theme of U.S Literature is escape of American boys from the existing society and embrace a journey or quest into the unknown world. It is the arbitraries of the modern society which forced the writer to chronicle the ...

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

The story of a young traveler Christopher Johnson McCandless has interested many people. He was a young man from a wealthy family, which decided to travel alone after graduating from the University and to spend some time in the wild of Alaska. His story so inspired remarkable writer Jon Krakauer that he decided to dedicate his book to this young man. This story began with books. The guy liked to read Jack London. He greatly admired the writer's position in life. “London’s fervent condemnation of capitalist society, his glorification of the primordial world, his championing of the great ...

Transcendentalism was a philosophical belief, which thought that nature held the key to the greater truths of mankind. Jon Krakauer in his book “Into the Wild” may not have been a transcendentalist himself, but it is apparent that the subject he writes about in the book, Chris McCandless, shared the same ideas as the transcendentalists which lead him on the journey that it did, across the United States, into Mexico, and into Alaska, where eating poison potato seeds led to his death. But though he died, during the last years of his life while he was freely moving across the ...

Introduction

“Into the wild” (1996) by Jon Krakauer and “Lead us into temptation: the triumph of American materialism” (1999) by James B Twitchell are two books with similar themes – the only difference being that one is an antithesis of the other. Before beginning on the journey of the exploring these themes and understanding what each of the author sought to achieve in writing the respective books, let us take a brief look into the story of each of these aforementioned books.

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

“Into the Wild”, though seemingly a fiction, is essentially a non-fiction book, which was written as an extension of an article Jon ...

In April of 1992, Chris McCandless walked into the Alaskan wilderness and died there. He was the child of an upper-middle-class family, who provided him with every opportunity in life, and yet, he felt a burning desire to renounce all his worldly possessions and trek off into the Alaskan wilderness. Prior to his renunciation of all his worldly possessions, McCandless had excelled both academically and physically; he ran cross-country, and had been accepted to Emory University to study as an undergraduate. In his investigative piece Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer describes McCandless as particularly energetic and strong-willed. Krakauer notes that ...

The term freedom can be used by individuals in various aspects. In speech, freedom is the right to speak freely; in movement, freedom is the ability to move freely; and in society, freedom is the absence of slavery and captivity. A country on the other hand may look at freedom as the right to self rule, without any interference from another country. Human actions, when not restricted or monitored properly, can greatly result in lack of freedom. Susan Faludi in her article “The Naked Citadel” writes about men who do not want the citadel to go coed. She discovers ...