Into the Wild

The Search of Chris McCandless

“Chris was born into the wrong century. He was looking for more adventure and freedom than today’s society gives people” (Krakauer 174). Chris McCandless always has been different than everybody else and lived his life after his own ideals. In the novel Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer Chris McCandless tries to find who he is and what to do with his life. Although he agreed with the transcendentalists about their opinion of how one should live their life, the changes in society between the time when transcendentalists, like Thoreau or Emerson, created their philosophy and the time Chris McCandless lived made it sometimes simply not possible for him to actually live all the ideas he aimed.
Chris McCandless, or Alexander Supertramp, how he used to call himself some time during his journey, has always been different than everybody else. He wanted to live his life to the fullest, to the best of his ability and how he thought it would be the best for him, not how somebody told him he has to live it. In the novel Into the Wild, Krakauer states “Alex admitted that the only food in his pack was a ten-pound bag of rice. His gear seemed exceedingly minimal for the harsh conditions of the interior, which in April still lay buried under the winter snowpack. Alex’s cheap leather hiking boots were neither waterproof nor well insulated. His rifle was only .22 caliber, he had no ax, no bug dope, no snowshoes, no compass” (5). Though he was very unprepared, and he knew that he was unprepared, to live a bigger amount of time in the Alaskan wilderness, he still wanted to go and none of the many people he met on his way could ever change his mind. Chris McCandless wants to live a life that reaches up to the expectations of a transcendentalist like Thoreau or Emerson would have had and he does everything that he thinks would have made the them proud. In his essay “Walden” Thoreau states “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as...