This is the true story of a young man who died trying to live out his dreams. The dreams were kind of stupid, but it’s still kind of sad.
Chris McCandless acts normal around his parents at his university graduation. They don’t hear from him again till he is dead of starvation two years later. He has plotted this from the start. Here is a letter to his sister:
. . . once the time is right, with one abrupt, swift action I’m going to completely knock them out of my life. 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. I’ll be through with them once and for all, forever.
His parents haven’t abused him or anything. They are very normal but he is kind of a little bitch. The author includes a great quote from GK Chesterton:
For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy
Chris wants to be in touch with nature using his own two hands and such implements as he finds romantic (e.g., rifles). He wonders the country for a while until he decides to backpack into Alaska where due to some blunders (e.g., deciding maps are not romantic) he starves to death.
Krakeur puts Chris into context with the various other dreamers, such as a climber named Waterman, who spent 145 days alone climbing some mountain and then lost his mind attempting to climb the next mountain with just a tub of margarine as supplies. Krakeur outlines the type, young men with a monomaniacal bent, of which he says he was one, nearly dying himself in Alaska as a “self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life” As he says:
It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it . .
I don’t know who this ‘you’ is he is addressing but I don’t think they’re probably female. It is quite sweet though that he thinks this is a universal experience.
In any case, I have made a little bit of fun of McCandless, which is not perhaps very kind. I admire his idealism, and his attempt to do something unusual with his life. It is just very tough to swallow how illogical and contradictory it all is. The love of Tolstoy, for example, who everyone knows talked a big talk about altruism while frogmarching his unwilling wife through 13 children and into poverty. This idea that ‘man vs nature’ could involve a gun but not a map. The idea that living without government is a great idea, as if millions of Somalians aren’t fully available to tell you that it’s not. It’s all so silly, I struggle to be sympathetic.