Jon Krakauer wrote the book “Into the Wild”, and it is about a young man named Christopher McCandless who literally takes a journey into the wild. As the book started off it was clearly indicated that McCandless would be dead by the end of his journey. This tells us that whatever he was doing out there was probably not a smart thing to be doing. Christopher may come off as a sympathetic young man with a profound moral cause who is seeking a higher truth because of all the ideas that he has in his head about where he is headed. Jon Krakauer doesn’t believe that Chris was doing anything wrong but what Chris was doing was completely wrong. Krakauer does not make an effective case in trying to justify McCandless’ behavior because McCandless made a lot of unwise choices. To add on to that McCandless would not accept assistance from any of the people who were trying to help him out even though it was pretty obvious that he was about to head into the Alaskan wilderness clearly underprepared.
The first reason why Krakauer’s argument isn’t justified is because Christopher McCandless made a lot of unwise choices during the duration of his trip. First of all he did not tell any of his family members exactly where it was that he was headed to. Along his journey he did tell a few people that his overall goal was to survive a while in the Tundra, but he wasn’t even specific with them about where exactly it was that he was headed to. Krakauer and other supporters of Krakauer’s argument may say that McCandless telling people where he was headed to wouldn’t have had a big impact on the outcome. But when you look at his situation during his last few weeks alive, he was very ill and couldn’t do very much to take care of himself. So if people knew where he was at there is a chance that they would’ve gone to check up on him and he would have been rescued and would have survived. It wasn’t a very good choice for McCandless to keep his location a secret from his friends and family.
Another reason why Krakauer is wrong is because McCandless had refused assistance from anybody who tried to help him along is journey. During his journey McCandless encountered a lot of people. Some people met him while he was trying to hitchhike from one point to another, and others met him because he needed a job or somewhere to stay. A lot of these people grew fond of McCandless and tried to talk him out of his journey as soon as they figured out where exactly he was trying to go to. Like Jan Burres and Bob felt like they had a special with McCandless because they weren’t very close with their own son anymore, and so they tried to talk McCandless out of the journey. Then there was Wayne Westerberg who gave McCandless a place to stay for three days. Before McCandless left Westerberg told him that he was always welcome back in Carthage, and to look him up if he ever needed work. Jim Gallien was the last person to see McCandless alive as he dropped him off at the Stampede trail right before he headed into the wild. Gallien gave him some boots because he saw that the ones he had on clearly weren’t meant for the extreme conditions that he was about to face, and asked him to reconsider walking into the tundra but McCandless’ mind was all made up. Ronald Franz gave Chris a long ride to Colorado and during the ride he also tried to convince Chris not to go live in the wild, but Chris still wasn’t listening. Charlie offered Chris an RV to stay in that he was supposed to be taking care of, but Chris wouldn’t stay. Christopher McCandless had a lot of opportunities to avoid going into the wilderness and stay alive but his mind was one hundred percent made up that he was going to be living in the Alaskan wild for a while and he refused to take input from anyone, so there was no one that could change his mind.
The last reason why Krakauer’s argument is unjustified is because it was pretty clear that as McCandless headed off into the wilderness he was going underprepared. Chris had this belief that you should only travel with what you can carry on your back as we found out from his mother, and so that could have been a major reason why he was so underprepared. When McCandless was dropped off at the Stampede trail by Jim Gallien, Gallien had to give him “an old pair of rubber work boots”, because he needed it if he was going to have a chance of surviving out in the wild.
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